Rocket Surgery

In an earlier post I wrote about my experiences trying to write a plugin for Hudson. In that article, I wrote about how I basically gave up because I was having too hard a time wrestling with Maven for the small amount of code I was writing.

Well, time passes, and I decided to try again, but this time I decided to look into what it would take to fix an issue I’ve had with Hudson. (For the curious: at the time of this writing, Hudson cannot verify that your LDAP settings are correct if your server does not allow anonymous binding - issue 1589).

For some reason, I was more successful this time. Perhaps last time I was trying at a point where the code repositories were unstable (let’s face it, it happens). Perhaps there were some changes made in Maven (I did go from v2.0.8 to v2.0.9 in the interim) that made some difference.

But in all honesty, the biggest difference was most likely in me. First off, I had tried this once before, and so I had a bit more experience and familiarity this time, and instructions and documentation always make more sense under those conditions. Second, I wasn’t looking at building a plugin, I was looking at making a change to core Hudson, so I started from a different source base. Third, we are always growing and learning, and perhaps this time I was just more ready in some unquantifiable way.

So, I wrote the code and tested it, and it seems to work, so now I’m looking into joining the project and contributing my fix.  For others who may want to do the same thing, I’ll put together a post on how to set up a build environment for Hudson.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 13th, 2008 at 6:08 am and is filed under Software development.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.