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VMware, Inc.
Palo Alto, California.
“Reliable software rebuilding.”
[PDF slides]
[mmath-thesis]
Abstract:
“Continuous software building and testing is essential for
catching bugs early, when they are least costly. Large systems can
take a significant amount of time to build from scratch; ideally, only
the parts that have changed should be rebuilt. Recent build tools have
improved the reliablity of rebuilds over older tools like make; for
example, SCons keeps state between builds and uses MD5 signatures to
detect changes. However, certain types of build behaviour are still
difficult to achieve reliably due to the fact that a full dependency
graph must be constructed before starting the build. In this talk, I
will describe an alternate model for rebuilding centered around
constructing the dependency graph dynamically as the build is carried
out. I will discuss some of the design decisions related to
implementing this model, and I will show how this approach can
simplify aspects such as the handling of configuration variants and
implicit dependencies.”
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