Supporting the Development Process of the DataGrid Workload Management System Software with GNU autotools, CVS and RPM

DataGrid is project funded by the European Commission to develop and deploy distributed computing components for reference applications in the domains of Particle Physics, Earth Observation and Bioinformatics. The software development is shared among nine contractual partners, in seven different countries, and is organized in work-packages covering different areas. In this paper, we discuss how combination of Concurrent Version System, GNU autotools and other tools and practices was organised to allow the development, build, test and distribution of the DataGrid Workload Management Sys-tem. This is the product of one speci_c work-package that is not only characterised by rather high internal geographic and administrative dispersion (four institutions with de-velopers at nine different locations in three countries), but by the fact we had to integrate and interface to dozen of third-party code packages coming from different sources, and to the software products coming from other three development work-packages internal to the project. high level of central co-ordination needed to be maintained for project-wide steering, and this had also to be re_ected in the software development infrastructure, while maintaining ease-of-use for distributed developers and automated procedures wherever possible.