We have 100+ services/apps in a repository in Azure Devops. We have defined a single CI/CD YAML multistage pipeline for each (build and deployment). This limits blast radius and allows for auditability of each release of each project. We rely on templates for all the real pipeline work so this is easy to maintain; just a small root azure-pipelines.yml file for each project that includes the needed templates.
Now, we'd like to start using PR validation builds. And, as best as I can tell, we have two options:
Create a separate PR build for for every project and use the UI/API for policies to create 100+ policies
Create a single PR build that has stages for all 100+ projects.
I'm not a fan of the 1st option as now we'll have 200+ builds. The 2nd option is possible, but to avoid a 3 hour PR build, we'd need a way to only run needed stages (aka project builds).
Is there a 3rd option I'm missing? If the 2nd option is our best bet, how do we turn off stages for projects not changed in that PR (i.e. what condition would we use)?
(FYI, our policy is to change only one project per PR, but there are, on occasion exceptions to that.)
For personal suggestion, I also recommend the second method. Though the build script would be very large in one configure file, but much better than have hundreds build configuration files.
But the difficulty is these 100+ apps are all in one repository. This means all the normal method will not suitable for you, include using Build.Repository.Name value as the stage condition. Also, there's no more details which describing the source file path stored in the commit.
So, I suggest you and your team developers input the project name info into your commit message. Then, in the build pipeline you could use the variable Build.SourceVersionMessage to get its comment message. Since this is a environment variable which only work in step level(Not work for stage level and the job level), it needs you add one task in the first step and use the condition for it.
The logic of it is add one step as the first one in every stages. This step is only used to conditional judgment. If the Build.SourceVersionMessage matches the prefix or any key contents words, the jobs will be early-exit.
If use the condition like this:
condition: startsWith(variables['Build.SourceVersionMessage'], '[maven-plugin]')
It needs your commit message must follow a strict content writing format, starting with the specified project name.
Another condition can for you consider is:
condition: in(variables['Build.SourceVersionMessage'], 'maven-plugin')
This does not need the strict content writing format, but also need input the project name in the commit message. Thus it could be evaluated in the job condition with the above script.
Hope it could give you some help.
I am creating a patch for a product. I don't want the patch to access the details of original files during patch installation. So in Patch creation property i have changed the value of IncludeWholeFilesOnly to 1.
But, 'IncludeWholeFilesOnly' property with a value of 1 (one) in the Patch Creation Properties (PCP) file delivers the wrong time stamp for the un-versioned dll's delivered in that particular patch.
problem is instead of dll modification time-stamp it shows the patch creation time stamp.
whereas if i change the value of IncludeWholeFilesOnly to 0 then everything will be proper.
How to fix this issue. Is there any other properties which i can modify so that time remains same.
Timestamps are irrelevant (even though they are to you) because they are not used anywhere to decide whether a file is the latest or not. So the system doesn't preserve them. When you install a non-versioned file it will set the create date and modify dates to be identical so that any modification will change the modify date, and Windows will assume that the file has been updated and so a patch won't overwrite it.
Versioned binaries are replaced or not depending on the version rules; data files are replaced or not depending on file hashes:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa368599(v=vs.85).aspx
and for example your non-versioned files:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa370531(v=vs.85).aspx
So this is the way it works, and dates aren't used to decide which is the latest. The best way to manage binary file versions is to use file versions.
Is there an actual problem, or do you just not like the way the dates change?
I have a customer who accidently wrote about 3 megs of data to the wrong quickbooks file. They had a backup in the same folder for reasons unknown... however their accountant still was writing to the old file. Now we have like a 3 meg difference between 2 250~ meg QB files and I need to figure out how to merge these files (which quickbooks does not support) and generate some sort of report so that they can get their accounting info semi straightened out in some sort of organised fasion. Any help would be appreciated. Thank you for taking the time to read this.
(EDIT) - explanation for last few sentences above... They have conflicting invoice numbers and possibly other things due to last level of use of each file.
Karl Irvin has a Data Transfer Utility that can be used to transfer transactions and list items between QBW files. www.q2.us - his tools are widely used and very reliable.
He also has a report combiner tool, if all you want to do is see reports that are taken from data in two files.
QQube (www.clearify.com) can also generate reports from multiple QBW files.
I'm having some issues with the installation of Rational Team Concert on my server.
The thing is that when I upload some changes to the server (any kind), it changes the last modified attribute of the file, but it shouldn't do it.
Is there a way to avoid this behavior?
Thank you in advance!
This is something that we have tried to add to RTC SCM (and we still plan to). However, we found that it needs to be an option on load/update.
There are numerous details and discussions available # this work item on jazz.net
Regarding timestamp, getting over the fact that relying on it in a version control tool isn't always considered a best-practice (see "What's the equivalent of use-commit-times for git?"), it is actually a complex issue:
an SCM loader wouldn't use just timestamp to determined what file has changed (Task 179263)
you can have various requirements for that timestamp (like in Defect 159043, where the file timestamp of the modified file on disk that of when it was delivered, not when I accepted.). The variable JAZZ_CCM_SKIP_MOD_TIME=true is mentioned so check if that could improve your specific case.
it is all based on the assumption the timestamp is correctly set by the local workstation, which isn't always true, as illustrated in Task 77201
Background
We use a central repository model to coordinate code submissions between all the developers on my team. Our automated nightly build system has a code submission cut-off of 3AM each morning, when it pulls the latest code from the central repo to its own local repository.
Some weeks ago, a build was performed that included Revision 1 of the repo. At that time, the build system did not in any way track the revision of the repository that was used to perform the build (it does now, thankfully).
-+------- Build Cut-Off Time
|
|
O Revision 1
An hour before the build cut-off time, a developer branched off the repository and committed a new revision in their own local copy. They did NOT push it back to the central repo before the cut-off and so it was not included in the build. This would be Revision 2 in the graph below.
-+------- Build Cut-Off Time
|
| O Revision 2
| |
| |
|/
|
O Revision 1
An hour after the build, the developer pushed their changes back to the central repo.
O Revision 3
|\
| |
-+-+----- Build Cut-Off Time
| |
| O Revision 2
| |
| |
|/
|
O Revision 1
So, Revision 1 made it into the build, while the changes in Revision 2 would've been included in the following morning's build (as part of Revision 3). So far, so good.
Problem
Now, today, I want to reconstruct the original build. The seemingly obvious steps to do this would be to
determine the revision that was in the original build,
update to that revision, and
perform the build.
The problem comes with Step 1. In the absence of a separately recorded repository revision, how can I definitively determine what revision of the repo was used in the original build? All revisions are on the same named branch and no tags are used.
The log command
hg log --date "<cutoff_of_original_build" --limit 1
gives Revision 2 - not Revision 1, which was in the original build!
Now, I understand why it does this - Revision 2 is now the revision closest to the build cut-off time - but it doesn't change the fact that I've failed to identify the correct revision on which to rebuild.
Thus, if I can't use the --date option of the log command to find the correct historical version, what other means are available to determine the correct one?
Considering whatever history might have been in the undo files is gone by now (the only thing I can think of that could give an indication), I think the only way to narrow it down to a specific revision will be a brute force approach.
If the range of possible revisions is a bit large and the product of building changes in size or other non-date aspect that is linear or near enough to linear, you may be able to use the bisect command to basically do a binary search to narrow down what revision you're looking for (or maybe just get close to it). At each revision that bisect stops to test, you would build at that revision and test whatever aspect you're using to compare against what the scheduled build produced that night. Might not even require building, depending on the test.
If it really is as simple as the graph you depict and the range of possibilities is short, you could just start from the latest revision it might be and walk backwards a few revisions, testing against the original build.
As for a definitive test comparing the two builds, hashing the test build and comparing it to a hash of the original build might work. If a compile on the nightly build machine and a compile on your machine of the same revision do not produce binary-identical builds, you may have to use binary diffing (such as with xdelta or bsdiff) and look for the smallest diff.
Mercurial does not have the information you want:
Mercurial does not, out of the box, make it its business to log and track every action performed regarding a repository, such as push, pull, update. If it did, it would be producing a lot of logging information. It does make available hooks that can be used to do that if one so desires.
It also does not care what you do with the contents of the working directory, such as opening files or compiling, so of course it is not going to track that at all. It's simply not what Mercurial does.
It was a mistake to not know exactly what the scheduled build was building. You agree implicitly because you now log that very information. The lack of that information before has simply come back to bite you, and there is no easy way out of it. Mercurial does not have the information you need. If the central repo is just a shared directory rather than a web-hosted repository that might have tracked activity, the only information about what was built is in the compiled version. Whether it is some metadata declared in the source that becomes part of the build, a naive aspect like filesize, or you truly are stuck hashing files, you can't get your answer without some effort.
Maybe you don't need to test every revision; there may be revisions you can be certain are not candidates. Knowing the time of the compile is merely a factor as the upper bound on the range of revisions to test. You know that revisions after that time could not possibly be candidates. What you don't know is what was pushed to the server at the time the build server pulled from it. But you do know that revisions from that day are the most likely. You also know that revisions in parallel unnamed branches are less-likely candidates than linear revisions and merges. If there are a lot of parallel unnamed branches and you know all your developers merge in a particular way, you might know whether the revisions under parent1 or parent2 should be tested based.
Maybe you don't even need to compile if there is metadata you can parse from the source code to compare with what you know about the specific build.
And you can automate your search. It would be easiest to do so with a linear search: less heuristics to design.
The bottom line is simply that Mercurial does not have a magic button to help in this case.
Apologies, it's probably bad form to answer one's own question, but there wasn't enough room to properly respond in a comment box.
To Joel, a couple of things:
First - and I mean this sincerely - thanks for your response. You provided an option that was considered, but which was ultimately rejected because it would be too complex to apply to my build environment.
Second, you got a little preachy there. In the question, it was understood that because a separately recorded repository revision was absent, there would be 'some effort' to figure out the correct revision. In a response to Lance's comment (above), I agree that recording the 40-byte repository hash is the 'correct' way of archiving the necessary build info. However, this question was about what CAN be done IF you do not have that information.
To be clear, I posted my question on StackOverflow for two reasons:
I figured that others must have run into this situation before and that, perhaps, someone may have determined a means to get at the requisite information. So, it was worth a shot.
Information sharing. If others run into this problem in the future, they will have an online reference that clearly explained the problem and discussed viable options for remediation.
Solution
In the end, perhaps my greatest thanks should go to Chris Morgan, who got me thinking to use the central server's mercurial-server logs. Using those logs, and some scripting, I was able to definitively determine the set of revisions that were pushed to the central repository at the time of the build. So, my thanks to Chris and to everyone else who responded.
As Joel said, it is not possible. However there are certain solutions that can help you:
maintain a database of nightly build revisions (date + changeset id)
build server can automatically tag revision it is based on (nightly/)
switch to Bazaar, it manages version numbers differently (branched versions are in form of REVISION_FORKED.BRANCH_NUMBER.BRANCH_REVISION so your change number 2 would be 1.1.1