Previously, my nightly builds of Kolab have been built and hosted here:

https://obs.kolabsys.com/project/show/home:tpokorra:branches:Kolab:Development

There were 2 problems recently:

  • I was not able to add builds for CentOS7. The error message is:
    Failed to add project or repository: unable to walk on path 'CentOS:7/standard'
  • Each time there was a new patch or release on Kolab:Development, I needed to manually remove the patch from the nightly package because the patch was already part of git master. I also needed to resolve conflicts in the debian.changelog and package dsc file because the version number changed.

UPDATE: since there was an easy fix for Point 1 (just edit the Meta file of the project to add different Operating System), I also realised I could update the OBS packaging instructions the same way as I do for LBS, avoiding conflicts. So we will see if that works over the coming weeks…

After some improvements to my LightBuildServer, I am now able to build the nightly packages on my own LBS server.

This is done in two steps:

  1. Updating the package instructions: This is done by an LBS job, that basically is running this script: The package instructions are downloaded from https://obs.kolabsys.com/project/show/Kolab:Development, and the source tarballs are downloaded from https://git.kolab.org/. Then the changelog is updated, patches removed, some other patches applied… Also some conversion is done on the files to make Debian happy to build them. The result is uploaded to https://github.com/TBits/lbs-kolab-nightly
  2. Then I run different jobs on LBS, for each Operating System that I currently support: CentOS6, CentOS7, and Debian, to rebuild the selected packages with nightly tarballs.
    The result can be viewed here: https://lbs.solidcharity.com/project/tbits.net/kolab-nightly

These steps are executed each night, by a cronjob that initiates the builds on the LBS, by calling for example

tbitscredentials=tbits.net/secret
wget -O /dev/null https://lbs.solidcharity.com/triggerbuildproject/tbits.net/kolab-nightly/centos/6/amd64/$tbitscredentials

To test the nightly builds, you can install the nightly repository like this, additionally to the Kolab 3.4 and Kolab Development repo:

For CentOS6:

yum install yum-utils
yum-config-manager --add-repo https://download.solidcharity.com/repos/tbits.net/kolab-nightly/centos/6/lbs-tbits.net-kolab-nightly.repo

For CentOS7:

yum install yum-utils
yum-config-manager --add-repo https://download.solidcharity.com/repos/tbits.net/kolab-nightly/centos/7/lbs-tbits.net-kolab-nightly.repo

For Debian Wheezy:

apt-get install apt-transport-https
echo 'deb https://download.solidcharity.com/repos/tbits.net/kolab-nightly/debian/wheezy/ /' >> /etc/apt/sources.list
apt-get update

With the LightBuildServer I have full control over the builds, can just modify a config file to add a new target OS (if my LXC scripts support it), and can review the history of the package instructions on Github.

Of course, one disadvantage of LBS compared to OBS is: the LightBuildServer is not intended to directly support the work in a team. Team-work happens via Github (or your self hosted Gitlab), and every team member could install his own LightBuildServer.

A feature that LBS is still missing is that multiple build containers are just assigned with any job, without checking if one job should wait for another job to finish. A first step would be to distribute the jobs per Operating System to different build containers. Well, still lots of room for improvement…

Nightly builds of Kolab now available from LBS
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