[Cruisecontrolrb-users] Is CruiseControl.rb for me?

[Eric Hanchrow]

Naturally I want some sort of continuous integration system.  But what
makes my situation unusual is that what I want to build is structured
in an unusual way, and it's not clear to me if CruiseControl.rb can
gracefully handle that structure.

I want to independently build half a dozen "projects", each of which
(in CruiseControl.NET terms) is its own "queue".  Each corresponds to
one deliverable set of files.  (One project represents our web site;
another represents a Windows installer that we build ...  etc).  Now,
those projects don't simply correspond to a single Subversion URL;
instead, each is composed of a number of "kits", each of which has its
own Subversion URL.  We have about 50 separate kits; most are
basically a bunch of C-sharp files and a .csproj file.  Each kit
typically depends on some others; the kits thus form a directed
acyclic graph of dependencies.  We have a tool that will build a kit,
and all its dependencies; and will also check them out of Subversion
if needed.  I wrote this tool myself and am perfectly comfortable
hacking it.

For each project, I want CruiseControl.rb to monitor the bits of the
subversion repository that correspond to the constituent kits, and
trigger a build whenever anything changes in those bits.  Note that
this is not the same as monitoring the entire repository, since I
don't want a change in an unrelated kit to trigger a build for this
project; nor is it the same as monitoring just one kit, since the
project depends on many kits.  Our building tool already knows how to
determine whether a kit needs to be updated, so I'm imagining that
CruiseControl.rb would simply invoke the build tool as a subprocess.

At first I thought I would be able to teach it to do this by suitable
fiddling of the "SourceControl" class, but I quickly confused myself
-- partly because I haven't yet figured out how CruiseControl.rb
works, and partly because I barely know the fundamentals of Ruby.

I also have a very vague suspicion that, fundamentally,
CruiseControl.rb assumes that there's a one-to-one-to-one
correspondence between projects, Subversion URLs, and working copies;
and that I'd need to change that assumption in order to get things
working the way I want.

Anyway: does sound doable -- for someone who's a decent programmer but
new to Ruby -- and if so, do you have any advice on how to start?