Abstract

People involved in modular projects need to improve the build software process, planning the correct execution order and detecting circular dependencies. The lack of suitable tools may cause delays in the development, deployment and maintenance of the software. Experience in such projects has shown that the use of version control and build systems is not able to support the development of the software efficiently, due to a large number of errors each of which causes the breaking of the build process. Common causes of errors are for example the adoption of new libraries, libraries incompatibility, the extension of the current project in order to support new software modules. In this paper, we describe a possible solution implemented in ETICS, an integrated infrastructure for the automated configuration, build and test of Grid and distributed software. ETICS has defined meta-data software abstractions, from which it is possible to download, build and test software projects, setting for instance dependencies, environment variables and properties. Furthermore, the meta-data information is managed by ETICS reflecting the version control system philosophy, because of the existence of a meta-data repository and the handling of a list of operations, such as check out and commit. All the information related to a specific software are stored in the repository only when they are considered to be correct. By means of this solution, we introduce a sort of flexibility inside the ETICS system, allowing users to work accordingly to their needs. Moreover, by introducing this functionality, ETICS will be a version control system like for the management of the meta-data.