I need to build and test on multiple configurations: linux, osx and solaris. I have slave nodes labeled "linux", "osx" and "solaris". On each configuration, I want to (a) build (b) run smoke tests (c) if smoke tests pass, then run full tests, and perhaps more.
I thought that multi-configuration jobs might be the answer, so I setup a multi-configuration build job and it starts concurrent builds on each OS. The build job will trigger a downstream smoke-test build, which, in turn, triggers the full-test job.
I've run into the following issues
If one of the configurations fails, the job as a whole fails, and Jenkins will not fire any downstream jobs (e.g., if the solaris build fails, Jenkins will not run smoke tests or full tests for osx and linux).
The solaris build takes about twice as long as the others (on the order of an hour), and I'd prefer the linux and osx smoke tests not wait for the solaris build to finish.
Does that mean I'm left with hand-crafting three pipelines of jobs, and putting them behind a "start-all" job (i.e., creating and hand-chaining the following jobs)?
build-linux smoke-test-linux full-test-linux
build-osx smoke-test-osx full-test-osx
build-solaris smoke-test-solaris full-test-solaris
Did I miss something obvious?
As far as I know the answer is to create 3 matrix jobs, one for each system. They then would have 3 subjobs (build, smoke-test, fulltest) with the build-job as a touchstone.