[Buildbot-devel] trying to use buildbot for freeware scientific data package...

[Ed Hartnett]

Howdy all!

I'm a programmer working on a scientific data package called
netCDF. This is a NSF funded library for (mostly) Earth science.

More info can be found at www.unidata.ucar.edu/netcdf

Our package is released and supported on many platforms, including
AIX, HPUX, Linux, Windows, Mac OS, and others.

Right now we do our platform testing "by hand." And by "we" I mean me.

Obviously this sucks and I never want to do it again. (I'm doing it
for the first time right now, as I just started here recently).

This is where buildbot comes in. For a start I would like to get it
working with my machine as the buildmaster and also my machine as a
buildslave, building a few variants for Linux. Once that's working
I'll start adding buildslaves for all the other platforms.

I've installed Twisted and BuildBot, and will use the mail
notification, so I don't need CVSToys. I am reasonably familiar with
python, but no expert (yet).

I am having a very hard time coming up with a master.cfg file. I have
the sample file, which is for the Twisted package, but it is hard to
see exactly how to customize it. Also it doesn't look complete. For
example:

# I set really=False when testing this configuration at home
really = True
useFreshCVS = False

c = {}

c['bots'] = []
for bot in private.bot_passwords.keys():
    c['bots'].append((bot, private.bot_passwords[bot]))


etc.

This is using stuff from a private.py file, so I really don't get a
good idea of what to put in here. Does anyone have a simpler
master.cfg, without the use of other private.py files, which
illustrates a simple setup?

Thanks for any help!

Ed Hartnett
Unidata