There is not really a right or wrong answer to this, but I am curious as
to whether there is any point to installing tools as part of a build
process.

For example, one could go to the length of installing the compiler, code
generators, revision control system, cruise control and basically
everything except maybe NAnt from your build script. It would have the
advantage of setting up the whole environment, and being able to have
the environment be setup correctly from any machine that runs the
script. This would be helpful if you had to recreate an old environment.


It would obviously have the disadvantage of running much more slowly.

I suppose a middle ground would be to have a separate NAnt script/target
that did these sorts of installs, and you only run it when you are on a
new machine, or something has changed...

If you just expect the tools to be installed, then you have a job
setting up a new machine, virtual machine or whatever. If you do this
often, it might be worth automating, and it might be as easy to write a
NAnt script to do this as to document the process.

Any thoughts? What do you do to manage your tool sets? 


A similar question comes up as to whether to do a clean before a build
every time, or just some of the time (say the nightly build) or just
when manually requested. These clean builds are useful from time to time
especially if files have been deleted from revision control, and you
want to make sure everything still works, but they can also be very slow
for a Continuous Integration environment.

-Kelly





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