Hudson gets first milestone release as an Eclipse project

Oracle's Winston Prakash has announced the first milestone release of Hudson 3.0.0. This is the first release of the continuous integration package since it was placed under the Eclipse Foundation's umbrella. The move to the Eclipse Foundation was made following a contentious split that saw a large part of the Hudson community support Jenkins, a fork of the project managed by Hudson creator, Kohske Kawaguchi.

To get Hudson to this stage, the developers have had to remove all dependencies on GPL and LGPL libraries, switch to using BIRT charts rather than the LGPL JFreechart, move all the code to Eclipse's git repository, and start a continuous build process for Eclipse Hudson. Prakash said: "I'm glad, we have done this. The entire process gave us a great opportunity to clean up Hudson code base and make it easier to maintain in the future."

The work to make Hudson an Eclipse-compliant project is not finished though. The project is half way through completing the "Contribution Questionnaires" (CQ) that establish the IP provenance of components and getting them approved by Eclipse; the individual components and external JavaScript libraries have completed this process while the external Java libraries and build and test libraries for Hudson are yet to be approved. Prakash says they expect this work to take three to four months during which there will be further milestone releases; they are planning a Hudson 3.0.0 final release around May-June.

Hudson 3.0.0 milestone 0 is for testing and evaluation purposes only. An EPL licensed WAR file can be downloaded from Eclipse.org and source code is available from the project's repository.

The current stable production version of Hudson is the MIT licensed version 2.2.0, available to download from the hudson-ci.org site. Over the past year, the Hudson developers have included features such as project cascading and Maven 3 support into this version.

(djwm)