1. Build and Test system for FairRoot
M. Al-Turany, R. Karabowicz and F. Uhlig
GSI, Darmstadt, Germany
The simulation and analysis framework FairRoot, developed for the experiments at the new
accelerator center FAIR, uses the open source tool CMake as bases for their build and test
system. The open source tool CDash is used to setup a website as central entry point to
access all the gathered information about the status of the system.
CMake is an open-source, cross-platform C/C++ build manager, available for a great variety
of platforms (Linux, MacOS, SunOS, HPUX, Irix, Windows,...), that lets you specify build parameters in text files. These text files are then used by CMake to generate files for native
build tools such as UNIX-style makefiles or project files for IDE's like Eclipse, KDevelop,
XCode and Visual Studio.
This enables the developer to work with the development environment
he is used to and not to use the tool which was chosen by someone
else which increases the productivity.
CMake provides a "simple" macro language which is powerful enough
to setup the build environment even for complex projects, but CMake
supports also complex custom commands whose results can be used
in the input files. In FairRoot this functionality is used to run the
Root C Interpreter (Cint) which create source files compiled later during
the build process.
CMake includes also a complete and automatic dependency generation
for C, C++ and Fortran. 1 1 2
CDash is an
open source,
web-based
software
testing server.
CDash
aggregates,
analyzes and displays the
results of
software testing
processes
submitted from clients located anywhere. FairRoot uses
CDash to check the state of our software system, and to continually improve the quality of our code. CDash was developed to design, manage and maintain large-scale software systems. 2
Testing
FairRoot fully supports many platforms (different Linux flavors, Mac OS
and support for Open Solaris on the way) with an increasing size and
complexity of the project. Beside that the project depends also on many
external software packages. It is quite evident that we have to identify
problems when they occur, so One of our important goals is to know the
status of the project as much detailed as possible at any time.
For this task we use CTest (part of CMake) together with the dashboard
CDash. Due to the perfect integration of CTest in CMake the setup of the tests in the build process is easy. The
tests in our case are running Root macros which starts a simulation, reconstruction or analysis.
The complete test chain is more complex. It starts with an update of the local working directory from the SVN
repository. After this step the configuration creates the makefiles necessary on the actual platform. Finally after the project was build out of the sources, the tests are done and all the results are send to the central web-server. On
the web-server the gathered data is available for display. This push scheme allow users to setup their own client if
they have a new "untested" platform without any work for the administrators of the web-server.
The test cycle can be started manually if developers want to test some new features they have implemented in their
private version, or they can be started automatically. A nightly test run on all supported platforms each night and a
continuous test runs whenever there was a commit to our SVN repository.
SVN maintains
source code revision
automatic test
Typical developer
commit code
Continuous test
Dashboard
notification
in case of
problems
Check
results