In preparation for the next ladvd release I decided to investigate automated software builds, to make sure that it will work on as many platforms / distributions as possible. I’d like to avoid having to release a .1 version just to fix silly configure on RHEL X.Y Building the virtual machines to do this myself seemed like a lot of work, so I decided to investigate online software compile farms.
The first one I looked at was Launchpad. I started out by adding ladvd as a project to Launchpad, the whole gpg signing and upload dance is very neat. This however doesn’t allow you to actually build software, for that you need to start a PPA, which luckily also is pretty easy. However Launchpad doesn’t provide a lot of control over the compile process, and only Ubuntu is supported.
So I started playing around with the second option, the OpenSUSE Build Service. The initial signup was similar to launchpad, except no gpg this time. Which is a shame because it makes signing the packages impossible. But the amount of distributions supported (RHEL, SuSE, Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora) is great, and I especially like the buildlogs which show you exactly what is going on. Getting the packages built for Debian and Ubuntu was trivial, and even the specfile for RPM distributions was done in a few hours. After that I realized that it would be even better to run unit-tests during the package build. Then I ran into a bug which sadly makes this impossible (check’s pkg-config is missing). But there was a bugzilla link where I’ve reported the issue so hopefully it will be solved soon.