We have some code in git and I started setting up Jenkins to grab our branches and try a compile. It seems that a few of the branches may have begun to rot in the years since they were last built, as they fail to finish a make.
I would like to build all branches that are found, except for a list of excluded ones. Is this possible in Jenkins? This will let me get things up and running, then come back to enable more branches as I try to fix them.
What I have tried so far
Regex with lookahead
Looking at the 'Git > Branches to build' option I was hopeful that I could replace the default '**' wildcard with a :. A bit of digging about and double checking with http://rubular.com/ suggested that the following might do what I wanted.
:^(?!origin/exclude\-this\-branch\.v1|origin/exclude\-this\-branch\-too.v2)(\S+)
Now there is an assumption here about the regex engine running in the background. I would hope it might understand lookahead, but if it does not that explains why this method fails. It seems to build all the branches, including the one I am try to exclude. Maybe I just need to find some more debug?
Looked for similar questions here
I came across Jenkins/Hudson Build All Branches With Prioritization which seemed to contain a possible solution in that some added an inverse option to branch matching https://github.com/jenkinsci/git-plugin/pull/45 sounds like what I need. Sadly this does not seem to be in the version of Jenkins I have, which is odd as 2011 is a long time ago.
The System I Am Using
Ubuntu LTS 14.04. Jenkins ver. 1.611. GNU tool chains to make C/C++ code.