[tei-council] Problems with the UVic Jenkins server

[Martin Holmes]

Hi all,

You probably haven't noticed, but right now we have some major problems 
with the Jenkins server I run at UVic. The basic issue is that I 
upgraded the operating system to 14.04.1, and the result is that there's 
a conflict between the version of the svn client provided by the 
operating system (which we use as part of the build process) and the 
version which is baked into the Jenkins build system (which handles 
watching the SourceForge repository, checking out changes, and 
triggering builds). The net effect is that the checked-out codebase we 
are trying to build is subversion 1.7, and the svn client we call to 
find out some information about it during the build process requires a 
newer version, so it errors out.

This is a know Jenkins bug:

<https://issues.jenkins-ci.org/browse/JENKINS-18935>

but that bug has been open for a year and a half. We may need to get 
creative to work around it.

Apologies for this, but it's not a bad thing in the long term. 
Sebastian's Oxford Jenkins, which is the main one, tends to be very 
conservative and stable, and one of the purposes of mine is to make sure 
we can set up build processes on newer server OSes, and to maintain a 
working build script which people can use to create their own Jenkins 
servers. It may mean we go into a release process with only one Jenkins, 
but I think that should be OK. We've never yet had to fall back to using 
the UVic Jenkins during a release, IIRC.

Cheers,
Martin