What is a nightly build?

An automated process (a couple of shell scripts and a cronjob) runs once a day, retrieves the latest and greatest sources from CVS, and builds our software and website. There is no human actively overseeing this process, and hence these builds may be of very low quality (they may simply not run, contain bugs, crash your PC, or worse). Nighly builds are useful if you can't or don't want to use subversion yourself, but want to keep up-to-date on the latest bleeding edge developments. In addition, they are a useful debug mechanism for the excalibur developers.

BIG FAT WARNING!!

Do not use nightly builds! They are preview releases only, and that's the only thing they're good for. If you do use nightly builds in an application, you are doing so at your own risk.

Where are they?

Our nightly builds are run on brutus. They end up at

http://brutus.apache.org/~nightlybuild/builds/excalibur/

How does this work?

See

http://wiki.apache.org/gump/BrutusConfig/NightlyBuild

and

http://wiki.apache.org/gump/BrutusConfig/RequestANightlyBuild

for details on how the nightly build scripts are set up. (Really, you don't want to know. It's very ugly.)

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