RISC OS Autobuilds

Over the last few days, we’ve been working hard behind the scenes to replace the partly manual system of rebuilding the main downloads (ROM images, HardDisc4 archives, etc) with a fully automated system. This is now in place and the hope is that it should run behind the scenes each night to update all of the main downloads.

Here’s an overview of what it does:

• re-build the development builds themselves, currently: IOMDHALDev (softload), TungstenDev (softload), OMAP3Dev (ROM), OMAP4Dev (ROM)
• re-build the HardDisc4 development build (both the tarball and the self-extracting utility)
• re-build the various CVS repository tarballs
• re-build the checked-out source code tarballs for the development builds listed above
• recalculate all of the MD5 checksums on the updated downloads that are displayed on our download pages

This is quite a complex process involving three different remote servers, emulators, lots of cron jobs and the like. It’s quite possible that things may not go entirely to plan so hopefully we can iron out any glitches that become apparent over the next few days. You should find that the updates appear on our site every day between 5:30 and 6am UK time. Attempting to download one of the above archives from our site during that window might, just result in you downloading a corrupt file.

If someone breaks something in CVS which causes builds to fail, it should just result in the affected download component(s) not being updated on our site until such a time as the problem is corrected – it shouldn’t result in that component vanishing off our downloads page!

Please let us know via an email to info@riscosopen.org if you spot any problems with the downloads.

Credit is due for Jeffrey Lee on his work on the RISC OS autobuilder, which provides automated builds using a special console build of RPCemu.

Also note: if one morning there have been no changes in CVS affecting a given build since the last autobuild, there won’t be a newer version built and uploaded onto the site.