Having problems - Perforce sync and multiple step execution #115

I am trying out QuickBuild, and have run into a couple of problems...

The first issue is fairly serious - I have run into the following error when syncing to our Perforce depot:

ERROR - Problem exec'ing P4 command: error: open for write: <<path removed>> The filename or extension is too long.

I can't display the complete path for confidentiality reasons, but it's 262 characters in length (in this particular instance). This is a problem for us, as a particular portion of our depot has this deep directory structure and it will be necessary to sync this data as it will be required later in our build process.

FYI, I searched through JIRA and didn't find any reported bugs of a similar nature...

The second problem is more prosaic: when I run a build, it only seems to run the first step; it completes the sync (after tweaking my clientspec to filter out the paths that were causing the above problem), but never executes the 'build' step even though the step's condition is set to "execute if no parent step has failed". I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong here, as I don't see a lot of options in the individual step configuration that could cause this to happen... Or maybe I'm just missing something completely obvious. <img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_smile.gif" alt=":)" title="Smile" />

Environment-wise, QuickBuild is installed on a dual Xeon (EMT64) box with 4 GB RAM and is configured to use a MySQL database as its back-end. I am currently just running it as a standalone application and not inside a servlet container. For reference, a full sync of our Perforce depot is about 5 GB.

One last question: can multiple instances of QuickBuild share a single database (or even differently named DBs on the same DB server)? I noted above that I'm running MySQL; the reason I switched is that the P4 sync operation would eventually hang the application when QuickBuild was running against HSQLDB, so I'm kind of hoping that I don't need to have MySQL installed on each build machine...

Any information or assistance is greatly appreciated!

Bryan,

As the max path length is set by Perforce command (or Windows), QuickBuild can hardly do anything to address this. To make things slightly better, you may point working directory of the configuration to a short path, ie, d:\build. And files will be sync-ed into d:\build\checkouts directory, which possibly makes the total destination path shorter.

As to the build step not running problem, it is most probably that you've not add this step into the execution list of "default step". If this does not help, you may back up your database into XML file with the "clear password" option checked (assuming you are running QuickBuild 1.1.0), and send it my way for diagnostics. We guarantee that all your project related information will be kept secretly.

Currently one instance of QuickBuild should use a separate MySQL (or SQL Server) database. QuickBuild does not care whether they belongs to single database server or different servers.

Hope it helps.
Robin