>There is still a feeling within the community that builds are too hard. It is important for those responsible for the various build systems to help document how to setup those builds and provide examples.
There is still a feeling that a project needs a release engineer to handle their builds. However, in an open source project that is resource constrained this is not always possible. So, who is going to construct the build? It is going to have to be the responsibility of the team on the project to be the release engineer. Yes one person usually starts and gets it going, but that knowledge needs to be documented for the rest of team. Knowledge silos are a dangerous thing in any project, but particularly an open source project. Knowledge of how the build is done should be freely documented and available.
Builds are important, and they need to be given the same attention that you give to writing the code for your project. Everybody on the team should understand how the build system works. Anybody on the team or community should be able to easily run a build regardless of their development system (this is more important outside of the eclipse community where different tools are used and there is no one common development platform in place.)
The EMF related projects are consolidating on Buckminster for their builds. Others are using Maven/Tycho, and many are using Athena Common Build. Whatever build system your project or group of projects choose, make sure that anybody on the team can run them and understand them. Build diversity is a good thing. Knowledge silos on a project is bad.
