I've been using Luntbuild for a bit over a week now and the only things I've found that I don't care for are minor or something that can probably be corrected in a later version (hey, it's open-source, so I might as well submit a patch, right). The only inconveniences I've found so far are:
- I'd like to be able to send an e-mail to one list of recipients when a build succeeds (our QA team, so that they know that there's a new build that they can look at) and to another list of recipients when it fails (to all of the developers so that they can begin fixing the problem). Unfortunately, contact lists are at the project level in Luntbuild, so I can only send to everyone. But I can choose to send an e-mail for every build, for every failure, for every success, or when the status changes (from success to failure or vice-versa).
- I hate the name. It's not nearly as cool a CruiseControl or Anthill. Again I ask: What's a "lunt"?
- I see no mechanism for publishing build results like there is in CruiseControl. Sure the results are always published to the web interface and I can have it send e-mails. But I see no way to turn lava lamps on or off.
- Luntbuild provides a property to my Ant/Maven scripts that is a directory to place JUnit test reports into. If I have my build place the JUnit test reports into that directory, a link shows up in the build page to the JUnit test reports. That's a nice feature. Now I want a similar directory and property for test coverage reports (such as those from Clover or Cobertura).
But here are a few of the things I like:
- Luntbuild has a very flexible versioning mechanism. I can assign versions to my builds using almost any versioning scheme that I can dream up. It allows me to place arbitrary text, project-level properties, and OGNL expressions in a String that defines the format of my version number. Muy cool.
- Builds can depend on other builds in two different ways: First, if build A depends on build B, then I can have Luntbuild build B before attempting to build A. Or, I can flip it around such that if build B occurs, then build A is fired off as in reaction to build B.
- Cobertura works with Luntbuild...I never could get it to work with CruiseControl. I know why it didn't work, but I couldn't figure out a way around it.
I see that Luntbuild 1.2 beta 2 is now out. This indicates progress toward 1.2 final, but I'm in no hurry to upgrade. Looking at the release notes, there's nothing in beta 2 that I can't live without for awhile. The only bug fix that applies to me is the bug concerning JUnit test reports and Firefox.
