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

Supporting the development of the Workload Management System in the context of the European DataGrid was a challenging task as the team was characterized by a high geographic and administrative dispersion, with developers distributed in various institutions and countries. Further, software dependencies were complex as it was required to integrate and interface a significant number of external software packages. In this paper, we discuss how a combination of Concurrent Version System, GNU autotools and other tools and practices was organized to allow the development, build, test and distribution of the software. With the proposed solution, we managed to combine ease-of-use for distributed developers while preserving the central coordination needed by the project-wide steering.