I am easily distracted. If a build takes more than say, three seconds, I usually will flip to doing something else. This means that I often miss when a build is completed, and end up losing a few minutes here, a few minute there.

Well no longer. I use Zenity! What is this you ask? I didn’t know either until today. Zenity is a command line tool for making a popup window appear.

Now My build scripts look like this:

mvn -o -Pdev install
zenity –info –text “Build is completed”

This kicks off the build, and, when it is done, I get a lovely popup window telling me: the build has completed.

As the Corollary to Murphy’s law states: If its stupid, but it works, it ain’t stupid.

Why zenity? I mean, there are at least a dozen different ways to popup a window. Well, in keeping with that Cardinal programmer virtue of laziness, it is because zenity is in the Fedora11 repo, and I am running Fedora 11. yum install is my friend.

Yes, I realize that if I were cooler, I would make my script tell me success versus failure, and pop up the appropriate window for that. I’m not that cool.

OK, I wanto to be cool. Here’s the new version:

mvn -o -Pdev install && zenity –info –text “Build is completed” || zenity –warning –text “Build Failed”

This pops up a warning message box on mvn returning non-zero for failure. Note the use of the && and the ||. The evaluation of this is kind of cool: The && (logical and) has short circuit semantics, so the second portion only gets evaluated if the first part evaluates to true. However, the || (logical or) only gets evaluated if everything before it fails.