Build components

After a weekend of work, I finally got myself a build component that I'm semi-pleased with, for C and C++ projects, using Subversion. Most likely works for any other lower level programming language as well.

First off, structure. Each component is it's own BTT(Branches, Tags, Trunk)-root, residing in a Project_Modules directory in subversion. Each component contains an inc, src, test and a stubs directory. Rationale for the BTT-root is that, with a separate BTT-root for each component we can raise the version of each separate component without having to raise it for the entire project.

The Project directory resides on the same level as Project_Modules, and is empty, only containing the subversion property externals pointing to the trunks of the Components in Project_Modules. Rationale for this is to have a simple place to checkout the entire project. It's a bit dangerous when working with branches, and requires a little bit extra care so one doesnt write into the trunk out of mistake. Possibly block everyone but a specific user to write in the trunks and have that CM person do all the branching/merging. It is time consuming however.

It looks something like this:

• Project_Modules
• Component1
• inc
• src
• test
• stubs
• Component2
• inc
• src
• test
• stubs
• Project
  

Inc directory is the public interface of the component towards the other components. Src directory contains the actual code of the component. Test contains unit tests (personally, i create a new directory for each new unit test file). Stubs contains the stubs of my own component. Ie, Component1/stubs will contain stubs for the functions in Component1. Rationale being that 95% of the time, we want to stub another component in the same way, instead of keeping stubs of a component in 10 different components, we keep it in one place.