[Buildbot-devel] Re: buildbot and sourceforge compile farm

[Olly Betts]

On 2006-05-04, Alexander Lorenz wrote:
> just took a brief glance at tinderbox ... what are your reasons to
> switch from tinderbox to buildbot?
> a few words on the advantages/disadvantages of both would be
> appreciated

It's partly what I want to achieve, which doesn't fit too well with
tinderbox's worldview.  Because of its origins, Tinderbox still tends to
be a bit "mozilla-centric" which is awkward if your needs are very
different to theirs.

Coupled with that, tinderbox doesn't provide a good way to customise a
lot of things short of hacking the tinderbox code itself - I've done
this to the extent that upgrading to a newer tinderbox version is a bit
of a daunting prospect!

With buildbot, I should be able to subclass to achieve a lot of what I
want to do, and I think the architecture will make it easier to add in
hooks where they aren't currently available should I need to, or at
least keep my code separate more easily.

I'd also like to be able to offer mail and irc notification of build
results, which moving to buildbot would provide.

Buildbot seems more actively developed - it appears tinderbox has had 7
commits in the last 8 months, mostly spelling corrections.  Also
tinderbox doesn't seem to get actual releases these days - you have to
get the code from CVS (though at least tracking CVS HEAD shouldn't be
too exciting, given the low commit rate!)

But tinderbox works well - well enough that I've not actually sat down
and migrated yet.

Lastly tinderbox is perl, buildbot is python - depending on your
language religion that may mean you'd tend to prefer one or the other
(personally I find Python a cleaner language, but mostly thanks to long
experience I still find I can usually actually get things done quicker
in Perl...)

Cheers,
    Olly