[Buildbot-devel] heads-up: internal changes

[Brian Warner]

I just finished committing some fairly significant changes to the BuildBot
internals. Status reporting has been completely reworked. Those of you who
have written BuildStep subclasses may want to review current CVS to see if
you will need to update your code when the next release comes out.

The BuildFactory configuration process is in flux too, hopefully towards the
better. The CVS/SVN checkout steps have moved to a new, simpler "mode="
argument, which simply requests one of four checkout/update modes:

 mode=update: perform CVS/SVN and build operations in the same tree. This
              does an incremental update and an incremental build

 mode=clobber: delete the tree before doing a checkout+build. This does a
               full checkout and full build

 mode=copy: perform CVS/SVN update in one tree, then copy the results into
            a separate build tree. This does an incremental update but a full
            build.

 mode=export: delete the tree, do a CVS/SVN export (no vc metadata), then a
              build. This is like clobber but gets rid of the CVS/ and .svn/
              directories, which sometimes cause spurious files to be
              included in, say, installation tarballs created during the
              build process.

I'm trying to put some backwards-compatibility hooks in place to let the old
clobber=/export=/copydir= arguments get interpreted sensibly, but I don't
think I can guarantee that they'll all work correctly. Once the next release
comes out, you'll want to update the build slaves at the same time as the
master. (again, I'm adding code to make mismatched master/slaves work ok, but
I can't be sure I'll get it right).

I'm aiming to get a new release out within a week or so, once I've got some
more testing done with the new code. I'm trying to add Darcs/Arch VC support
for that release: if anyone out there uses one of these version control
systems and could help out with testing, please let me know.

cheers,
 -Brian