Methods, apparatuses, and computer-readable media for computing checksums for effective caching in continuous distributed builds

Abstract

Methods, systems, and computer-readable media for determining whether dependencies of configuration files have changed such that the compilation strategy should be recomputed. Local build checksums are computed for individual configuration files. The local build checksums are computed by sorting input paths to the configuration files plus data indicating whether the path refers to a file or a directory and a checksum computed on the configuration file itself. The transitive closure of local build checksums are then used to compute a global build checksum: the local build checksums are sorted in order to compute the global build checksum. If the global build checksum is different from a previously computed global build checksum, then the compilation strategy should be recomputed, since this is a signal that the compilation strategy may not be valid anymore, e.g. because some dependencies in the configuration files have changed.