[Buildbot-devel] RSS feeds and microsummaries

[Robert Helmer]

Brian Warner wrote:
>
> Woah. If you can write an XSLT program that can generate that Waterfall
> table, I'll buy you lunch. You're crazy :). I nearly went insane trying to
> build it in Python.
>   

Yeah, it's pretty hairy.. here is what I managed to bang together today 
(only tested with Firefox 2.0 RC1):
http://people.mozilla.com/~rhelmer/mockups/waterfall/1/waterfall.xml

I haven't figured out how to line up the rows yet, but I think it's doable.
Whether or not it's a good idea is a different story :)

Make sure to view-source on that to see the source markup, I just made 
up the tags based on what I see on the buildbot waterfall page.

> But yeah, it would be nice to have some amount of buildbot status available
> in a variety of machine-parseable formats. My hope is that the "web parts"
> project (to make the Waterfall merely one form of web status page, and make
> it easy for admins to pick and choose what kinds of status pages they want to
> display) will give such an XML feed a URL to live and a config-file syntax to
> setup. The RSS feeds (various ones for things like all builds of a certain
> branch, all builds for a certain set of builders, all failing builds, etc)
> will benefit from this in the same way.
>   

I read through the RFC that you sent to the list; sounds interesting. 
Generating markup in a declarative fashion (e.g. XSLT) is kind of a 
pain, I don't think it should preclude the web-parts project or any 
other programmatic generation of data on the buildbot side since I bet 
it'll be easier to understand and maintain as Python code, but I think 
that it would be really useful to have the option of getting a 
buildbot-specific XML feed and parsing it or running it through custom 
XSL, especially to integrate with another system.