[Buildbot-devel] buildbot developement, further features and releases?

[Brian Warner]

> Brian, just out of curiosity. Are you still actively developing 
> buildbot? Do you have a features list / roadmap somewhere maybe?

I'm swamped right now with petmail (my project due to be presented at CodeCon
in a few weeks) but BuildBot is still very much on my attention radar. I will
probably do a minor release next week with a few small cleanups, and then get
back to adding new features in March. I may manage to do a "Buildbot: One
Year Later" mini-talk at PyCon (one of those 15-minute spontaneous things) to
describe what's changed since last year's talk..

Cleanups that are on the horizon:

 SlaveCommands should take a list of arguments, not a space-separated string

 Slaves are still losing connections (and not retrying properly) when the
 network goes bad, this needs review and fixing.

The new minor features that have been on my mind:

 Turn Interlocks into Dependencies (since that's how they really behave), and
 add real interlocks (which just keep two builders from running at the same
 time).

 Add a password-protected web button to reload the .cfg file

 Add an IRC command to tell you where the web page is

Medium-level features:

 Add a different web status page, which just shows the current and latest
 build of each builder (instead of showing the last 12 hours of history like
 the waterfall display does)

 Fix the CVSToys/newcred problems, or determine and document the right
 solution.

 Implement rebuild support, to let you upgrade a running buildmaster in
 place.

 Improve IRC status bot to have it announce test failures instead of being
 purely command-driven.

Higher-level features:

 Better test parsing, creating a list of specific failed test cases so they
 can be tracked over time. This would extend into automatic retry of
 intermittent test failures (timing issues), per-user notification of
 failures (module owners get notified when code in their arena fails), and a
 "hotlist" of current problems and the people responsible for them.

  I've chatted with a few people who said they might be able to put some time
  into this.

 "Try" builds (you send a timestamp and a list of diffs to the buildmaster,
 it runs a build with your tree, letting you test changes before committing
 them).


I don't have a schedule for these, it will all depend upon availability (mine
and volunteers). I estimate that the minor features listed above will take a
day or three each, the medium level ones are on the order of a week, and the
higher-level ones need a month and some helpers. We've got two other
developers on the list right now, but we're already looking for more :).

hope that helps,
 -Brian