[Buildbot-devel] Problems installing buildbot from arch

[Brian Warner]

> From: Brad Hards <bradh at frogmouth.net>
> 
> I tried to checkout from anon CVS, but it errors out with a complaint about 
> "too many links".

Oh, that's weird. I was unable to reproduce this.. has anyone else had
problems with anoncvs? (aside from the frustrating 5-hour lag?)

I tend to use the Arch repository these days (using Bazaar as a client), but
there's a bidirectional sync taking place between the two, so it really
shouldn't matter. I'll also put in a plug for the Darcs mirror, since I'm
really becoming fond of this tool.

> I had more success with Arch. However it doesn't install correctly.  
> Basically, it builds and installs without error, but then "buildbot setup 
> master" fails:

> Yep, the problem is that scripts/sample.cfg (and clients/debug.glade) are 
> installed with just owner rw.

Hrm. One problem I have with hopping between different VC systems is the way
they all handle metadata (in this case file permissions) differently. In
particular, I've noticed that my arch<->cvs sync scripts screw up the
permissions, at least every time I go into Arch and fix everything to be
world-readable and then check it in, the sync script comes back five minutes
later and undoes the permission changes. I don't know why.

It sounds like distutils is not fixing the permissions on the data files it
installs, and the fact that my local trees happen to have world-readable
permissions on those particular files means I haven't run into this problem
before. I'll add a note to try and fix this.

> Of course, I did find that the sample master.cfg file doesn't work with the 
> code from Arch - it doesn't have any scheduler.

Ah, oops, I need to update that. Another note added :).

> > c['schedulers'] = [mysched]
> Solved. Of course, I need the builderName, not the builder itself.

Ah, yes, right. I'll add an assertion to insure the builderName argument is a
string, hopefully that will make the problem easier to resolve in the future.
I've gone back and forth as to whether parameters like this should be names
or actual objects.. the original goal was to have some sort of
config-file-generating form on a web page, and at the time it seems like it
would be easier to achieve that if everything were referenced by name. But
it's been a long time since I've thought about that tool, and there have been
a couple of places (like scheduler.Dependent) where having actual instances
makes it harder to specify erroneous things like loops.

Let me know which you think would be better: continuing with names or
switching to actual references. Using references would force the config file
to be written in a certain order (slaves first, then BuildFactories, then
Builders, then Schedulers), but that might actually be a good thing, what
with the whole "there should only be one way to do it" philosophy that Python
gives us..

> Thanks again for buildbot - I've got high hopes for it!

Excellent.. keep us posted on your progress!

cheers,
 -Brian