Re: How to enable a publisher by default?

On 1/29/07, Kohsuke Kawaguchi <Kohsuke.Kawaguchi@xxxxxxx> wrote:

That is, I think your plugins would be more reusable to other people if
they don't have built-in knowledge about the policy of your development
team. For example, some of the jobs that I run on my Hudson would very
much like to use FindBugs plugin, but we don't have the policy like yours.

What you are describing makes sense too --- when you have a large number
of "similar" projects, it should be easy to configure them in a similar
way, without going through each project separately. But my point is that
such thing shouldn't really be baked into your plugin, because it should
be applicable to any setting, like log rotation, fingerprinting, IRC, etc.

I agree

This "maintaining a large number of projects with similar settings"
support is one of the obvious things that Hudson should do better, but I
haven't found a good answer that brings simplicity.

Perhaps one approach could be for you to extend Project and override the
configuration portion. It's still a Project, so it will behave like it,
but you can take over the configuration screen completely and let users
configure just small portion of parameters.

For example, your team might be using a standard directory layout
convention, and perhaps you won't have to make the javadoc directory
configurable. Or you might want to automatically enable IRC notification
to the channel name that can be automatically derived from the job name,
etc. All the jobs might use the same CVS server, and if so you can
eliminate the SCM configuration completely except perhaps the module
name and the branch name.

In this way, you should be able to eliminate a considerable number of
options from the configuration screen. Less form fields = simpler!

I like this idea. I think I should be able to make a generic plugin with no built in knowledge that would be useful for everyone, and then just extend it to produce the custom Project type you described to satisfy my particular use case which is more specific to my organization. That way everyone  wins ;)

I'll chew on this for a while. I'm keeping myself busy figuring out the ins and outs of jelly for the first time. Once I have the generic/simpler plugin done, I'll revist this thread and give an update of any progress I made with this sort of approach should anyone else watching be interested in how well that works out.


-- 

- Eric