Jenkins on ci.horde.org got a major update

The Horde continuous integration setup saw a major upgrade and a number of fixes during the last week.

The take home message for everyone that does not wish to read the full log: ci.horde.org will now run horde/framework/bin/test_framework after a new commit has been pushed. This reduces the load on the system significantly and you will get results faster. If you develop Horde code you should run horde/framework/bin/test_framework as well in order to check if your recent commits could cause failures on our continuous integration server.

The full recap of the recent changes:

• Update to the newest version of the Horde components tool. This allows to use the improved templating system.
• New configuration and build templates that allow to reduce the job build time by avoiding to rebuild the set of package dependencies if this is not necessary. This has an important implication: A code change in one package (e.g. Horde_Imap_Client) will be tested against unchanged dependencies (e.g. Horde_Mime). Even if the commit also touched one or several of the dependencies (e.g. Horde_Mime). The packages should be backward compatible - so this should result in no error. The dependencies of one package will only get updated in case the dependency list in the package.xml of that package changes.
• Running horde/framework/bin/test_framework has been integrated into the horde-git job. With the new "rebuild dependencies only when necessary" policy (see above) the component jobs do not fully test the integrity of the latest commit anymore. When the dependencies do not get updated the focus of shifts a bit more towards checking for backward compatibility. In order to not loose the integrity check for the "bleeding edge" our test_framework script is now executed right after updating the code from git.
• Running test_framework also allows to run component jobs only if the code of the component has actually been touched. This significantly reduces the load on ci.horde.org as it removes the need for rebuilding all components for each and every commit.
• An update to the newer CodeSniffer which included an update to the checklist for the Horde style. The new ruleset is available from our horde-support repository.
• A customizable ruleset for the PHP mess detector has been added as well. We still need to tweak the exact configuration of PMD to match it with what we consider reasonable defaults for Horde code.
• DocBlox has been added to allow generating experimental API documentation. DocBlox is significantly faster and less memory hungry than PHPDocumentor. It has already been adopted by large frameworks such as Zend. So I figured it is worth taking a look at it. Feedback welcome!
• The Jenkins configuration has been updated with the latest fixes and improvements from the Jenkins-PHP project.
• The setup procedure has been fixed so that it should be possible to generate a local setup - comparable to ci.horde.org - again.