ABINIT Nightly Builds

Description

Nightly is a hardware/software facility designed for the management of automatic nightly builds for ABINIT. The software part is made of four autonomous components:

• Merger, a tool which automatically merges active public branches into a copy of the trunk public branch and reports about the conflicts caused if the branch would be merged as-is;
• Builder, a set of scripts taking care of the nightly builds themselves;
• Scheduler, a tool in charge of organising the nightly builds, basically choosing which computer facility will build which branch;
• Notifier, an utility which formats the results for display on the web or transfer by email.

The hardware part is a set of computers managed by volunteers and covering most of the architectures ABINIT is usually run on.

Status

At present, the only functional component is Merger, which has reached α state. The development of Builder is almost done (90%) and mainly needs timeouts implemented. Scheduler is at 5% — which basically means that the build schedule is static and performed manually, while Notifier is at 20%.

Joining the effort

In order the join the effort, you need one or more computer with the following software installed and working:

• a Unix-compatible system;
• a SSH client;
• C, C++, and Fortran compilers;
• the GNU Autotools;
• Python 2.4 and Bazaar;
• Perl;
• timeout, a small package to force the tests to end.

For the moment we are not able to welcome more computers than those already assigned for the early tests. However we encourage you to drop a line if you have a computer ready. We'll recontact you in due time once we are ready for the β tests.

Troubleshooting

Problems should be reported to Yann Pouillon.