Home → Questions →

build from release tarball or CVS checkout

• Edit

Ingo Schwarze

12 Mar, 2019 10:45 AM

Hi,

i'm searching for a way to do occasional testing of my OSS project (mandoc.bsd.lv) on Microsoft Windows (i'm already in the habit of doing testing on OpenBSD, Debian Linux, and Oracle Solaris, and other developers regularly do testing on FreeBSD, NetBSD, illumos, MacOS X, and various Linux distros, but nobody i know seems to have access to any Windows server).

However, the requirement is to build from release tarballs (like http://mandoc.bsd.lv/snapshots/mandoc-1.14.5.tar.gz) or from CVS checkouts (see http://mandoc.bsd.lv/anoncvs.html). I will not use SVN, Mercurial, or git, and i absolutely won't use github or anything similar. Also, i don't want continuous integration (as in automatic builds after each commit); instead, i want to start builds on Windows manually when i need them.

I tried searching appveyor documentation, these forums, and the web for information of using appveyor to build from release tarballs (or less ideally, from CVS checkouts) but failed to find any information. Is there a way the above requirements can be met?

Thanks, Ingo

1. 1 Posted by Ilya Finkelshte... on 12 Mar, 2019 09:00 PM

   

   Hi Ingo,

   You can use customize build pipeline the way you want. Specifically you can run your own clone script (Clone script setting in General Setting tab in UI, or clone_script if you use YAML). In this script you can download your tarball.

   When you create new Project in AppVeyor, you have to select a source control. You can simple use generic Git and enter non-existing repository. With custom clone script it will not try do git clone so it will not cause any troubles. Looks little bit hacky, but should work.

   Ilya.

   • Edit

2. 2 Posted by Ingo Schwarze on 13 Mar, 2019 07:26 PM

   

   Hello Ilya,

   Thank you for your feeback, which i tried out, but with little to no success. Since i consider the error reporting generally inadequate - usually, there are no error messages whatsoever - i'm giving up on the service and i will delete my account.

   For example, for Windows builds (Visual Studio 2015 worker image) i get nothing but this output:

       1 Build started
       2 Collecting artifacts...
       3 No artifacts found matching 'config.log' path
       4 No artifacts found matching 'config.h' path
       5 No artifacts found matching 'Makefile.local' path
       6 Build success

   For Ubuntu, i get nothing but

       1 Build started
       2 Running "clone_scripts" scripts
       3 curl http://mandoc.bsd.lv/snapshots/mandoc-1.14.5.tar.gz
       4 pwd
       5 ls -al
       6 tar -xzvf mandoc-1.14.5.tar.gz
       7 Build exited with code 1

   No output, no diagnostics, nothing below "Messages", nothing below "Tests", nothing below "Artifacts", nothing useful below "Events", even though i tried to configure everything according to the documentation.

   It's just not worth the pain. Maybe i'll find some other Windows build service that is better documented and has better diagnostics at some time in the future.

   • Edit

3. Ilya Finkelshteyn closed this discussion on 13 Mar, 2019 07:55 PM.