Bob the build breaker
Hurray! Just broke the build for the last time, ever (this week). Highlights of the last few days include gcc 2.9 (installed with RedHat 7.3 from 2002 on one of our build machines for “legacy” customers). Needless to say, don’t expect to get C++03 from it, not even covariant returns.
On Wednesday, I spent a day fixing the Solaris build I broke when updating a sed script. It took me a two cycles of tweaking the script, committing, and getting a build failure email a few hours later before shelling into the machine and going through it character by character to weed out each error message. The script was a single line long, and let’s just put it this way: Sun sed and GNU sed are both idiosyncratic, and you aren’t going to work it from reading out the mans.
The lowest moment of the week at work was hosing the hosted group’s builds today. We have an interesting script as part of the build process which strips out certain components from the different platforms’ build procedures if, say, we don’t want to include a certain feature. No problem for the compiler or linker, but the package builders are a bit more brittle. I managed to create a few problems. On the plus side, our source build for two OEM customers now completes again for the first time since March when they last sync'ed with us.
Funnily enough, I did also do some code this week. Good times.