Image Packaging System (IPS) is a new package manager Sun has developed for OpenSolaris. While I have my doubts about whether a brand-new package manager was a good way of spending engineering resources, OpenSolaris had a number of very nice features that made it a convincing platform to run Jenkins, thanks to SMF, ZFS, and zones. So I used to produce IPS packages for Jenkins. I lost the ability to do this as I left Oracle and lost access to a Solaris system, but a recent blog post renewed my interest.

So I'm happy to announce that the Jenkins project has started producing IPS packages for the releases. With this addition, the Jekins project now produces 9 packages on different platforms (10, if you count Ruby as a separate platform :-)

We just posted the updated Long-term Release (LTS) of 1.409.2.

Just as a recap, with LTS releases, we plan on providing a release train that only has backported changes. 1.409.2 contains a handful of important bug fixes since 1.409.1. For more about LTS, see this wiki page.

Thanks to the heroic effort of those who are involved, namely Vojtech Juranek and a bunch of heroes, this release went through a rather rigorous testing, including all the automated tests we have plus a considerable number of manual eye-ball tests.

To download, click the "Long-Term Support Release" tab from the top page. If you've already been using LTS, you should start receiving update notifications soon.

We have released 1.409.1, our first long-term support (LTS) release, from the Jenkins project.

The idea of the LTS release is to provide a second release line the favors more stability and bug fix only maintenance. This release line branches off from a bit old Jenkins release (in this case 1.409), and we will only put important backported bug fixes. We'll keep releasing 1.409.2, 1.409.3, and so on, as such bugs appear, and in several months (our current thinking is 3 months) we'll designate another release and repeat this process all over again. I think it provides more comfortable upgrade path for larger deployments. For more about this, see Wiki.

In large companies that use Jenkins in a large scale, there often is a team of people who looks at incoming Jenkins release, tests it with their environments and their plugins, and then let their internal group consume them. With this release line, I'm calling for them to join the effort on this branch. Vojtech Juranek from Red Hat is already helping us tremendously, so is Yahoo in choosing the base release line and backporting. But it'd be great to get more people on board, as I think it'll benefit everyone to have a larger number of eyeballs on the same code.

Good portion of Java developers use Windows, so we tend to think the opposite is true, that a good portion of Windows folks use Java. But this is not true.

As Jenkins gains traction among .NET developers, it's becoming increasingly clear that Java is very alien to them. They naturally have no idea of what a war file means, and often don't even have Java installed, and so it was just not easy enough for them to start using Jenkins.

I'm happy to report that I've finally fixed this problem with the new Windows installer. It is primarily packaged as an MSI file — a common format that seasoned Windows devs/admins are familiar with. It can, for example, be deployed remotely on a large number of servers via Active Directory remotely. Or you can just double-click it to install it interactively. It bundles JRE, so no separate Java installation is needed.

The package also contains the bootstrap setup.exe, to install .NET 2.0 runtime if it's not installed yet. Between that and JRE, it got all the dependencies covered. I tested that by installing it on a fresh Windows XP install.

So I hope this makes Jenkins more attractive to .NET and other developers who live and die by Windows.

Last Friday the Hudson team rolled out a small 1.372 with two enhancements following the critical 1.371 release on Monday. Not a whole lot to say about this release other than go get it!

Enhancements

• Persist matrix-based security settings in a consistent order (issue 7138)
• Jobs can now use boolean expression over labels to control where they run.