OUR CURRENT BUILD PROCESS
We're a small team of developers (2 to 4 people depending on project) who currently use Phing to deploy code to a staging environment, before going live. We keep our code in a SVN repo, where the trunk holds current active development and, at certain times, we do make branches that we test and then (if successful), tag and export to the staging env. If everything goes well there too, we finally deploy'em in production servers.
Actions are highly automated, but always triggered by human intervention.
THE DOUBT
We'd now like to introduce Continuous Integration (with Hudson) in the process; unfortunately we have a few doubts about activity syncing, since we're afraid that CI could somewhat interfere with our build process and cause certain problems.
Considering that an automated CI cycle has a certain frequency of automatically executed actions, we see 2 possible cases for "integration", each with its own problems:
Case A: each CI cycle produces a new
branch with its own name; we do use
such a name to manually (through
phing as it happens now) export the
code from the SVN to the staging
env. The problem I see here is that
(unless specific countermeasures are
taken - IE deletion) the number of branches we
have can easily grow out of control (let's
suppose we commit often, so that we
have a fresh new build/branch every
N minutes).
Case B: each CI cycle creates a new
branch named 'current', which is then tagged with a
unique name only when we manually
decide to export it to staging; the
current branch, at any case is then
deleted, as soon as the next CI
cycle starts up. The problem we see
here is that a new cycle could kick
in while someone is
tagging/exporting the 'current'
branch to staging thus creating an
inconsistent build (but maybe here
I'm just too pessimist, since I
confess I don't know whether SVN
offers some built-in protection
against this).
With all this being said, I was wondering if anyone with similar experiences could be so kind to give us some hints on the subject, since none of the approaches depicted above looks completely satisfing to us.
Is there something important we just completely left off in the overall picture?
Thanks for your attention & (in advance) for your help!
