[Buildbot-devel] master status

[Brian Warner]

> But it's actually quite useful for developing debugging configs as well.
> Being able to reload you config on the fly and force changes is very
> useful. If you keep having to restart you BB master it looks to users
> like its very flaky, when you might just be refining the config, and
> when you have several slaves this can happen quite often.

Ok, I'll look into cleaning it up and adding some docs. The buttons along the
bottom need to go (they are a leftover from an earlier way of handling
builder status), and the "rebuild" button should be grayed out until it
actually does something (it is intended to re-load the buildbot's .py files,
to update the behavior of the various buildbot modules and classes without
actually having to restart the whole thing, but it hasn't been implemented
yet)..

> One of the reasons I didn't run this code is because it uses GTK. You
> might be better off rewriting it using Tkinter (the Python Tcl/Tk
> wrapper). This comes with the standard Python install and is pretty
> portable. The small debug apps should probably written using this.

Personally, I have a lot more familiarity with Gtk than Tk (I was never
really a big fan of Tcl as a language, so I didn't get into Tk via that
path). I think Twisted handles the Tk event loop ok, but it has had problems
with wx for years (apparently wx doesn't play nicely with other event loops,
and doesn't offer sufficient interfaces to let Twisted sit on top of the wx
loop instead). This may have improved recently (search the Twisted list for
"threadedselectreactor"), but I've got zero experience with writing wx apps.

That said, if somebody implemented some of these tools in Tk or wx, I'd be
happy to accept a patch.


thanks,
 -Brian