[ILUG] Cross platform building.

[Darragh Sherwin]

On 19/09/2007, Chris Collins <chris.collins at ulaa.ul.ie> wrote:
> Hey Guys 'n Gals.
>
> I've been googling around for a while, but haven't come up with much.  I've
> been given a task to set up a continuous build environment for my project.
> It's mostly Java with a few JNI bits.  Ideally I'd like to call ant, and
> have the build system spit out an Msi installer for Windows and an Rpm for
> linux.  My problem is getting the installers to build.
>
> For Windows we've decided to use Wix, as it supports a lot of what we want
> our installer to do (and it seems to suck less than InstallSheild).  From
> what I've found, Wix is .net based, and there seems to be a few blog posts
> about having it run on mono, though I haven't been able to find a howto.  If
> I could get this working, I could set up continuum or something similar on
> Linux and have it build both installers.
>
> Alternatively, I could set up my build environment on Windows, but then I
> need to find a way to build an rpm there.  I've tried rpmbuild under cygwin
> without much success.  I also haven't been able to find much info generally
> on building rpms on windows.
>
> I would be much obliged if anybody can provide me some info on:
> A. how to build an rpm on windows,
> B. how to run the Wix toolchain on mono, or
> C. has any other ideas I haven't considered
>
> Thanks,
>
> -Chris

Chris,

I have done a similar setup before using Hudson
(http://hudson.dev.java.net/) which is a continuous build system.
With Hudson, you can have slave nodes and you can assign certain
projects to particular slave nodes.
I ran the slaves on VMs using different guest OS, this removed the
headache of different packaging mechanisms on different OSes.
The Hudson slave nodes need to have the exact same directory layout as
the master which is a little annoying, but you can access all the
builds from the master if the slaves are building on an NFS/SMB share

Hope that helps
Darragh