few questions related to ant and jenkins.

[Punit Jain]

i have few questions.
1.> How do we see log file?
i mean our company have a product now if i compile one package using ant, and if compilation failed it gives me log file, and lot of errors are there in the log file, but there is nothing in those errors that this package is dependent to that package so you need to compile that package first, so how do i get to know dependencies in log fileS?

2.> right now i am only doing build of a project and creating eclipse project using ant, what else i can do?

3.> our company has a product, and they are using clearcase as version control tool, and ant to make the build automate, and right now we apply jenkins to make all them automatic, and in jenkins we gave the path for ant and clearcase, so my question is we didn't gave the installation path of our product in jenkins because of clearcase is refering to our product??

[Jeanne Boyarsky]

1) The build.log is written to standard out. To find dependencies, you should look at a third party component. Or write tests with jdepend to enforce package dependencies. Or write something to compile one package at a time.

2) What else do you want to do? You can run unit tests, static analysis, deploy, etc

3) I don't understand the question. The installation path means to me where you deploy to. Except that you aren't doing that.

[Punit Jain]

1.> but if i compile one package at a time, it gives me compilation errors because it depends on other.
the problem is that is a huge code written by other peoples and divide into packages and modules, and sometimes i need to build that code, that time i go lot of errors something like cannot find symbol in the created log file, dependencies i cannot find in the log files?

2.> i haven't used Ant earlier before in my college, and in my company i only did build and all till now with ant, that's why i asked what else i can do with ant.

3.> okay let me rephrase my question: Our company has it's own product (say: xyz), now for version control system we are using clearcase, and for making the build automatic we are using ant, now we installed jenkins on our server to automate all them, so we do not need to build it again and again manually, so the thing in which i am still confuse is:-

All the development we are doing for that product, all the code which written is for that product only, but at the time when i was installing jenkins i gave installation path of clearcase, ant and java only than how it is referring to our product?

[Jeanne Boyarsky]

1) Then don't compile it one package at a time. That comment was based on your suggestion. You are going to need to talk to someone on your team about how to build the software.

3) It's building your product by checking it out of the repository. It wouldn't need a path.

[Peter Johnson]

3) Are you asking where the resulting file is placed? For example, if you Ant script builds a WAR file, are you asking where does that WAR file go? Unless you coded up something to copy the WAR somewhere, it simply stays on the Jenkins build server. In our build environment we use Nexus to maintain a repository of all built artifacts (WARs, JARs, ZIPs, MSIs, etc.) which makes it easy for others to grab the things they need.

1) This is another thing that the Nexus repository would solve. We use Maven to grab all dependencies form Nexus before a compile starts.

2) You can do almost anything with Ant. Have you looked at the Ant documentation? There are detailed descriptions of all of the Ant tasks in the docs. I also recommend you get a book such as Ant in Action, it will explain how to best use Ant.

[Punit Jain]

Jeanne Boyarsky wrote:1) Then don't compile it one package at a time. That comment was based on your suggestion. You are going to need to talk to someone on your team about how to build the software.

yes i always ask to my mentor for the dependencies, but i just wanted to know, is anything i can do so that i do not need to ask this again and again?

Jeanne Boyarsky wrote:It's building your product by checking it out of the repository. It wouldn't need a path.

Okay.

[Punit Jain]

Peter Johnson wrote:1) This is another thing that the Nexus repository would solve. We use Maven to grab all dependencies form Nexus before a compile starts.

ohh you mean using nexus repository i can look the dependencies, but how? and we are using Ant.

Peter Johnson wrote:3) Are you asking where the resulting file is placed? For example, if you Ant script builds a WAR file, are you asking where does that WAR file go? Unless you coded up something to copy the WAR somewhere, it simply stays on the Jenkins build server. In our build environment we use Nexus to maintain a repository of all built artifacts (WARs, JARs, ZIPs, MSIs, etc.) which makes it easy for others to grab the things they need.

No Peter, i am not asking this, what i am asking is:
i have installed downloaded jenkins, and installed that.
now i am configuring that by going to Manage Jenkins->Configure System
and there i specify path for ClearCase, jdk and Ant only not also for that product for which we are doing development, why?

[Peter Johnson]

Punit Jain wrote:ohh you mean using nexus repository i can look the dependencies, but how? and we are using Ant.

There are plugins for Ant that understand Maven repositories (Nexus is a server that implements a remote Maven repository). Maven itself provides such a plugin (http://maven.apache.org/ant-tasks/index.html) and there is also Ivy (http://maven.apache.org/ant-tasks/index.html). Then you can specify the dependnecies in you Ant build script.

Punit Jain wrote: there i specify path for ClearCase, jdk and Ant not also for that product for which we are doing development, why?

Probably because there is no Jenkins plugin that knows about your product. Jenkins itself doesn't know about much, all of its knowledge about ClearCase, for example, is because the ClearCase plugin is installed in your copy of Jenkins (the Jenkins I use doesn't know anything about ClearCase, we don't have that plugin installed).