Strategies for maintaining a Symbol Store for nightly builds & release builds

Question

I am trying to set up a central symbol server for my organization and its various products. Each product has a nightly build, as well as "one-off" beta, RC, and release builds.

The goal I have is to keep about a month's worth of nightly build symbols, as we do a lot of "dogfooding' here so people use internal builds, and we'd like to easily debug files we get from our internal winqual when possible.

I also need to be able to permanently keep all beta, RC, and release build symbols.

After doing much research, I think the best approach here is to have two symbol servers: one for the nightly builds (which have the previous ~30 builds registered), and another to permanently store the beta, RC, and release symbols. I would have the build scripts add to the symbol store using the product and version tags to record the product and build number. After a successful build, a script would use history.txt from the symbol server to identify the oldest build not deleted, then delete it from the symstore.

In the case of the "one off" builds for betas, RCs, and release versions, they would be identified by a build & install person once they're created, and added to the 2nd symbol server (for permanent storage) as well.

So I've a few questions: Does this seem at all reasonable? There must be an easier way to do this, won't most organizations with a symbol server need to tackle this problem?

Secondly, if I am to go ahead with this approach, is there a fool-proof way to identify the oldest known symbol set registered with the server? I'd thought about using last modified dates, but history.txt seems most appropriate but a script parsing that may be error-prone. I was hoping it'd be possible to just add a symbol with product & version info, as well as delete one with product & version info.

Thanks in advance for any help. I'll gladly answer any questions anyone may have, or provide any clarifications.

Answer 1

I wrote a widget in Wise Script that runs for every build that does the following.

Assuming our versioning is 1.0.1.0

1.) 1.0.1.0 through 1.0.6.0 symbols are added to the store (5 runs)

2.) every time there's a build, the symbol store history file is parsed...

3.) when 1.0.7.0 is built and the symbols are added, 1.0.1.0 symbols are deleted from the symbol store.

I'm basically parsing out the version number and if the third place is more than 5 less than current, I parse the transaction ID and run a symstore.exe del /i %TRANS_ID%

This prunes my symbols for daily/CI builds to only the last 5 build symbols.

Any notable symbols such as a release, hotfix, patch...I simply change the product name and add the symbols manually...that way, I am only pruning the dailies.

If you'd like, I could cut/paste the code in here as SMS Installer code (same as Wise). I also wrote a similar widget that keeps my local archive 5 builds deep. That way, I'm not wasting space for my local archive for CI builds. I use both, but you could use either. The both use a simple .INI file for runtime navigation. That way, I can put them both in my Jenkins/Jobs/ folder and simply edit the .INI file for each. They're very light weight as the .EXE is only 161K for the archive_prunerator and 161 for the symstore_widget, plus a 4 or 5 line .INI file.

AJ

Answer 2

I think two separate symbol stores is indeed going to be your best bet. For managing the store for your nightly builds, I'd recommend taking a look at AgeStore: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff560046(v=vs.85).aspx