Problems building jenkins

[Olaf Lenz]

Hi!

I am a Jenkins core devel newbie.

Meanwhile, I have managed to get the Jenkins master branch to build, based on the "BUILDING.txt" file in the sources. However, I first tried to build using https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Building+Jenkins , which didn't work. I would like to fix the Wiki page, but I need some help for that.

Here is what I tried, and how it failed. Note that I am working on Windows 7.

I cloned the git repo and ran "mvn -Plight-test install".  When doing so, the build fails in the "core" component in some of the unit tests that were executed. I have attached the output of the mvn call to this message. A part of the problem seems to be that on Windows, symbolic links are not allowed by default, but that is not all.

So I thought that if the problem is just that some unit test fails, I simply disable the unit tests for now. On the wiki page, it is stated that to skip the tests, one can use "-Dskip-test-harness". Unfortunately, that didn't have any effect, the build still fails. If I understand it right, skip-test-harness will skip the independent test harness, which runs the integration tests, but the unit tests still run, right?

From BUILIDNG.txt, I saw the option "-DskipTests". When using that, jenkins finally builds.

So, my proposal or the wiki page would be:

• To add the command from "BUILDING.txt" for the very first trial to build jenkins.
• To hint at the option "-DskipTests" if the first "normal" build (with "mvn install") fails

Are there any objections? Or is there anything wrong in what I did?

Olaf

[Daniel Beck]

On 24.03.2015, at 15:32, Olaf Lenz <olaf...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Are there any objections?

Recommendations like that probably shouldn't be front and center where new contributors pick them up as the "recommended" settings. We want the tests to pass, after all.

If there's a simple way to determine whether the group policy allows symbolic links and maybe skip the tests if disallowed, that would be a feasible solution to this issue IMO.

[James Nord]

There's a few issues in building on windows - the test harness can hide useful failure traces in plugins etc..

and they are slowly starting to be ironed out - we may also have a windows build machine soon so we can do the build/testing on windows...

Jenkins already detects that symbolic links aren't enabled on a windows box when running - so it shouldn't be to hard to actually put in an assumeThat and check the platform. (unless it does this by trying to create a symlink to begin with...)

IIRC a group policy is just a fancy way of controlling a load of registry settings - in which case JNA can be used to read the key.

/James

[Olaf Lenz]

I forgot to attach the output of the mvn build, here it is. It doesn't look as though it is only the symbolic link problem.

[Olaf Lenz]

It turns out that the problems I had were connected to me using Windows...

After I have now switched to Linux for that matter, compilation works fine. ;-)

It might be worth mentioning on the Wiki page that Jenkins is mainly developed on *nix and that there may be some problems with Windows.