I’ve seen a lot of organizations running into this problem such that their build environment gets to a point where it is so complicated that the best way to preserve it is through archiving the image.  I’m talking about archiving the entire build machine using image tools such as Norton Ghost, VMWare, or Microsoft VirtualPC.  I’ve used all those tools and from past experience, I found that VMWare images works best though not without the cost of disk storage space — but HDD has gotten so cheap nowadays it no longer is an issue.

So why build machine image archiving you may ask?   Because sometimes when certain software gets released (1.0), the new (2.0) continues on the trunk with added features and *changes* compiler(s).  Now as 2.0 goes forward, the legacy 1.0 may still have bug fixes and the build loop may need to be brought back to reproduce a certain build; with that in mind, having a VMWare image works wonders in such situation.  There is a long list of benefits for such practice as well, but I’m not going through them now; I may add to this post in the future…