How do we do releases involving multiple platforms using Jenkins?

Question

We have a bit of a mess of a situation on our build machine...

I finally managed to get one matrix build working, a "first check that everything compiles" type of task which just compiles everything on the current platform it's running on. It runs on multiple platforms fine (about the only problem it might have is that it's compiling the java code multiple times when it could probably be optimised to do that once.)

I imagine that setting up a matrix build for "build installers" would be not too hard, either.

But there are two problems which will definitely hit.

1. There's one zip file we redistribute which ideally would contain all platform-dependent binaries in a single zip file to reduce duplication (essentially it's a library we hand out to others.)

2. The process we have for copying the actual releases up to the server relies on every single generated file for the same version number of the same product being ready before the build starts. No single-OS builds would have a complete enough view of the produced files to be able to do the release and it doesn't seem to be possible to add build steps which run in the parent job.

We're using Archive for Clone Workspace SCM as a post-build step for this initial matrix build, but it looks like that runs independently on each OS and no attempt is made to merge the results together.

How do other people get around all these issues?

I know I can just ditch matrix builds entirely and do everything via configuring multiple of each job, but we have three platforms now and the number of jobs would skyrocket.

Options which involve alternatives to Jenkins will be looked at seriously as well, as lately... the number of problems we have been having with it is enormous.

Answer 1

Here's what we eventually set up which is working:

• Project "platform-releases" is still a "Matrix Build".
• Slaves are each labeled with their relevant platform and we use the slave label as the parameters of the matrix.
• The "Archive Artifacts" is used to archive the useful files. ("Clone Workspace SCM" seems to be a dead end when working with matrix builds.)
• Project "unified-releases" is a normal build which copies in the artifacts from platform-releases. Since we copy the artifacts without specifying a specific platform, we get the artifacts for all platforms, which appear in directories named /os/windows, /os/macosx, etc.
• The Ant build knows about the location of the artifacts (they are outside the working copy) and pulls all the files into a single directory structure before uploading.
• "Parameterized Trigger" plugin is set up for platform-releases to trigger unified-releases so that the svn version it's working with matches the actual files produced. Unfortunately, we have to check out the entire repository despite only using a tiny portion of it, because there is a bug (suspected to be in the subversion plugin) which prevents subdirectories being checked out with the correct revision otherwise.