Last Friday, March 5th, Hudson 1.349 was pushed out into the wild with an even split of bug fixes and enhancements. Included in this release is Alan Harder's (a.k.a mindless) old data monitor code, discussed previously in the post "Call for Testers: The older the better." Included in this release were further updates to the japanese and german localizations of Hudson; if you're interested in helping localize Hudson into more languages you can join the effort via the Internationalization page on the wiki.

Now for the breakdown of the 1.349 release:

Bug fixes

• Fix deserialization problem with fields containing double underscore. (issue 5768)
• Fix deserialization problem for Exception objects where the XML has bad/old data. (issue 5769)
• Fix serialization problem with empty CopyOnWriteMap.Tree. (issue 5776)
• Fixed a bug that can cause 404 in the form validation check.

Enhancements

• Remote build result submission shouldn't hang forever even if Hudson goes down.
• Added a monitor for old or unreadable data in XML files and a manage screen to assist in updating files to the current data format and/or removing unreadable data from plugins that are no longer active. "Manage Hudson" page will show a link if any old/unreadable data was detected.
• Added a mechanism to bundle init.groovy inside the war for OEM. (report)
• Added an extension point to annotate console output. (issue 2137)

Contributors

Hudson 1.349 contains 43 commits from 6 contributors, due to the merging in of Alan Harder's old-data-monitor branch the commit count is a bit off from the amount of code change that actually went out in 1.349.

• abayer
• kohsuke
• mindless
• sogabe
• swiest
• wyukawa

As usual, you can go grab the latest .war file straight from hudson-ci.org or if you're using a native package, use your package manager to upgrade.

Michael Donohue, a Hudson developer who has taken on the role of master bug triage guy for Hudson, does something regularly which I've really come to appreciate as a Hudson developer myself: he sends out emails to the dev list with the top 10 voted issues at that time. This gives those of us in the Hudson development community a good sense of what's really important to our users, which in turn helps us decide where to focus our efforts. If you're interested, you can see the top voted issues over at our JIRA server.

A good number of those issues have been high on the list for a while - I'm actually in the early stages of work on a plugin to answer HUDSON-682, the current #1 most voted-for issue, two and a half years after it was opened. But I'm sure there are some equally useful features Hudson users would like to see added which aren't on that list. So I'm asking you, dear readers: what are you looking for in Hudson that isn't already there? Take a look around the existing issues - you may find a request that fits what you want lurking just out of the top 10, needing only your vote to push it into the spotlight. If no one's yet created an issue requesting your desired feature, well, create one.

Or, better still, write a plugin or contribute a patch yourself!

Editor's Note: If you're interested in writing a plugin, you can check out Hudson's wiki and/or this guide on the subject.

Andrew Bayer (abayer) has been a contributor to Hudson since early 2009, contributing to the ClearCase plugin, Hudson's core and a small number of other plugins.

A few weeks ago our fearless leader Kohsuke Kawaguchi joined the San Francisco Java Users Group to talk about continuous integration with Hudson. Thanks to Marakana for organizing the meetup, and Aleksandar Gargenta for posting the video and slides, embedded below.

The latest release, 1.348 of Hudson was pushed out to the repositories on the 26th of Feb. This release is primarily a bugfix release containing a number of fixes (listed below) and a few localization corrections

Bugs fixed

• Fixed a performance problem of the job/build top page when there are too many artifacts.
• Improved /etc/shadow permission checks.
• DIsable auto-refresh in Groovy script console (issue 5729)

Contributors

This release of Hudson contained 19 commits from 5 different contributors to "core":

• godin
• kohsuke
• swiest
• manuel_carrasco
• rseguy

As usual, you can go grab the latest .war file straight from hudson-ci.org or if you're using a native package, use your package manager to upgrade.

Are you working on a project which uses java.net's Maven repository for deploying its artifacts?

Well, if so, there's a great opportunity opening up for you to get off that problematic repository: Sonatype is helping java.net projects move to Sonatype's hosted OSS Nexus repository, starting March 5th. We're looking into moving Hudson over but for most smaller projects, this should be a no-brainer. Problems with the java.net Maven repository are legendary and Sonatype's OSS Nexus repository is a great alternative.

Take a look and see if this can work for you.

Editor's Note: Andrew Bayer (abayer) has been a contributor to Hudson since early 2009, contributing to the ClearCase plugin, Hudson's core and a small number of other plugins. Andrew also helps Kohsuke with a lot of Hudson's project infrastructure, most notably the migration from Bugzilla on Java.net to JIRA running at issues.hudson-ci.org.