DistriBuild: An Approach to Optimize the Software Build Process in a Grid Environment

In software project development, once implementation completes, the next phase deals with the generation of application binaries from source files. This process of generating binaries is termed as software build. Generating the binaries takes away a lot of productive time if the project is huge. However, if the generation of project binaries is performed on a distributed system, the time taken for software builds can be drastically reduced. Usually a distributed build generates tasks or commands (compile/link) out of each make file and transfers them to a distributed system to accelerate the build process. The disadvantage of this approach is that for every subsequent build the process of task creation is repeated which can take up considerable amount of time. This paper presents an approach to selectively analyze the modified make files and generate commands only for those make files. These commands are stored in a database for reuse in subsequent builds. This approach accelerates and optimizes the software build process.