Compiling once for remote nodes?

[Sean LeBlanc]

We have a project that uses Gradle and makes use of Selenium to run
tests on remote nodes (via JNLP) in order to break up the work and cut
down the time on slow-running Selenium tests. In order to avoid
problems, we checkout of our SCM, and run Gradle clean each time. As it
is, this runs for each job on the remote node.

As we add more nodes with more executors, it seems especially wasteful
to checkout, clean and compile multiple times, when it will result in
the same output.

Would it be feasible to do this instead?

1. Have master do the checkout,
2. Have master do the gradle clean and gradle compile, and
2. Use Copy to Slave plugin to copy entire resulting tree
4. Have the remote run the gradle test (perhaps somehow explicitly
forcing a skip of compile)


Would this work? Is there a better way?