Buildbot

The buildbots are hosted by the Apache Software Foundation: http://ci.apache.org/projects/openoffice/

The buildbot is a system to automate the compile/test cycle required by most software projects to validate code changes. With automatic and frequent builds, build problems can be pinpointed quickly, before other developers are inconvenienced by the failure. By running the builds on a variety of platforms, developers who do not have the facilities to test their changes everywhere before checkin will at least know shortly afterwards whether they have broken the build or not.

Clean and Incremental Builds

There are two different types of builds: incremental and clean. Incremental builds only compile files that have been changed since the last build and reuse object files and libraries of unmodified files where possible. Clean builds start with removing old build artifacts from the last build. Clean builds take more time to finish than incremental builds. They are necessary after incompatible changes to the code. A code change is considered incompatible when it affects files for which the build system does not have a dependency on the modified file.

Nightly and Snapshot Builds

The buildbot performs a daily build, also called "nightly build", of the latest revision of trunk. A snapshot build is done once per week for a fixed revision of trunk or one of the branches.

Platform Coverage

The buildbot coverage differs from platform to platform:

Linux

The nightly build is always a clean build. There are no general known problems with the Linux builds.

Windows

Clean builds are not reliable. The exact reasons are not yet known. Nightly builds are incremental builds by default. Clean builds can be requested manually (how?).

Mac

At the moment there are not nightly builds because there is not suitable buildbot for this platform.