There are many steps in building any consolidation; ON's build process entails creation of the proto area, compiling and linking binaries, generating lint libraries and linting the sources, building packages and BFU archives, and verifying headers, packaging, and proto area changes. Fortunately, a single utility called nightly(1) automates all these steps and more. It is controlled by a single environment file, the format of which is shared with bldenv(1). This section describes what nightly(1) does for you, what it does not, and how to use it.

nightly(1) can automate most of the build and source-level checking processes. It builds the source, generates BFU archives, generates packages, runs lint(1), does syntactic checks, and creates and checks the proto area. It does not perform any runtime tests such as unit, functional, or regression tests; you must perform these separately, ideally on dedicated systems.

Despite its name, nightly(1) can be run manually or by cron(1M) at any time; you must run it yourself or arrange to have it run once for each build you want to do. nightly(1) does not start any daemons or repetitive background activities: it does what you tell it to do, once, and then stops.

After each run, nightly(1) will leave a detailed log of the commands it ran and their output; this is normally located in $CODEMGR_WS/log/log.MMDD/nightly.log, where MMDD is the date, but can be changed as desired. If such a log already exists, nightly(1) will rename it for you.

In addition to the detailed log, you (actually, the address specified in the MAILTO environment variable) will also receive an abbreviated completion report when nightly(1) finishes. This report will tell you about any errors or warnings that were detected and how long each step took to complete. It will list errors and warnings as differences from a previous build (if there is one); this allows you to see what effect your changes, if any, has had. It also means that if you attempt a build and it fails, and you then correct the problems and rebuild, you will see information like:

< dmake: Warning: Command failed for target `yppasswd'
< dmake: Warning: Command failed for target `zcons'
< dmake: Warning: Command failed for target `zcons.o'
< dmake: Warning: Command failed for target `zdump'

Note the '<' - this means this output was for the previous build. If the output is prefaced with '>', it is associated with the most recent build. In this way you will be able to see whether you have corrected all problems or introduced new ones.