Building membase from the sources…

I thought I should share some information about my personal development model for membase.

I've set up a “sandbox” where I'm doing all of my development in with the following commands:

I like to keep my changes as separated as possible, to reduce the dependencies between them. Whenever I am fixing a bug report I would do something like:

That would build the entire Membase stack and put the files in /tmp/membase-build. I would then change my working directory to the module where I'm going to fix a bug and (hopefully) fix it.

After fixing the bug (and writing a test case!) I would commit the change and push it for review with the following commands:

The last command there would push the change to our review system, so that Dustin or someone else can read through the diffs and accept the patch if they like it.

If you look at the workflow above it looks pretty easy, there is however one little thing that is really annoying… That is that Membase is a cross platform project, so I need to ensure that the code compiles and works on all of our platforms. With the method above I would have to log into another system and set everything up and copy my change over to see that it works. For simple changes that only touch one module I could always use buildbot or Hudson to test it on all platforms, but that doesn't work if I do an interface change that affects all of our modules.

I'm kind of lazy so I don't want to do such boring work all of the time, so instead I wrote a script to set up the sources and create makefiles so that I can easily build the same source tree on all of my platforms.

In order for it to work you need to set up sharing on your filesystem:

To set up a tree for lets say bug 9999 I would run something like:

This will set up a build environemnt for Solaris that builds membase as a “multi isa” (both 32 and 64 bit) stack in /tmp/membase. But let's add support for my MacOSX, Ubuntu and Debian box as well. Since all of the code is located on my opensolaris box, I need to use the -s option to let it know where the source is located:

So let's look inside the bug_9999 directory:

All of the sources are located in the src directory, and all of the makefiles for the various platforms will reference that code.

To build on all of my platforms I'm just executing:

but I've got that in a script of course:

Unfortunately you can't start the membase we just installed in /tmp/membase, but I'm working on it!