[Buildbot-devel] Buildbot improvements

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Fri, Oct 07, 2005 at 03:23:03PM +1000, Stephen Thorne wrote:
> I took a braindump of what I'm thinking about doing on the weekend for
> the twisted vsprint, if anyone has any comments, I'd really appreciate
> it.
> 
> I'm basically thinking about making it possible to have many slave
> machines for a single slave column on the buildmaster.
> 
> http://www.livejournal.com/users/jerub/71638.html

Some thoughts on related veins:
  -- it'd be nice in general to have better UI for "groups" of
     buildslaves.  Our buildbot:
       http://venge.net:9000
     is already too wide, and in an ideal world we'd have lots _more_
     columns there.  Mostly this is because we want to test lots of
     different variants of basically similar setups... having some UI
     way to group related slaves together at the top level, and then
     drill down, would be nice, and seem to fit in with your
     multi-slave stuff.
  -- for your script, make sure projects can customize various parts
     easily.  You might find our recipe to be a useful data point:
       http://venge.net/monotone/bb-howto.txt
  -- a very nice feature that buildbot doesn't have, along the same
     lines as an install script, would be remote upgrading.  If a
     buildslave needs its build environment tweaked or its buildbot
     install upgraded, then one has to track down the buildslave
     owner, and this can be terrifically hard.  Data point: for our
     buildbot, we needed to tweak the buildslave environment, to
     upgrade to a newer buildbot version, and upgrade the local VCS
     install.  I sent out simple step-by-step instructions on July
     5th, and have sent some nags since then.  We _still_ haven't
     gotten all of our buildslaves running again.  (Maybe I should
     just be telling them to drop a certain public key in their
     buildbot user's .ssh/authorized_keys or something -- though that
     won't help for all the exotic systems that are where buildslaves
     are most useful...)

-- Nathaniel

-- 
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