[Buildbot-devel] [RFC+PATCH] Building from a merged source tree

[A.T.Hofkamp]

Eli Carter wrote:
> All,
> 
> We do development on a branch, then merge to trunk when a task is
> completed.  This allows us to prevent breaking trunk (most of the time). 
> But merge conflicts and integration bugs can bite you.  So, I want to use
> buildbot to do a test build of the proposed merged tree.
> 
> So I need buildbot to checkout trunk and merge in the branch, then do the
> build, test, etc. steps.
> 
> To do that, I added a 'merge' mode to the SourceBase class, and
> implemented it for SVN.  The attached patch is my first run at it, has
> been only lightly tested, and does little error checking.  Even so, any
> and all feedback on this is welcome.  In particular, is this approach
> valid?  Is it something that (after being cleaned up) would be viable for
> inclusion in the official tree?

I am not sure whether you should include knowledge about merge-tactics into 
buildbot, not in the last place because after buildbot says 'ok', you have to 
do the same thing again.

A seperate script that constructs the merge and have buildbot execute that 
script would be preferable imho.
In that setup, I don't really see the need for a buildbot-extension.


With respect to such scripts, we use the Combinator tools from Divmod.org for 
branch-management (across several projects), together with their UQDS 
development approach (a branch-based development approach). They pay special 
attention to handling merges in the branch rather than trunk (they call it 
merge-forward). I don't have experience with it, until now I didn't have a 
conflict when merging.

Maybe you could use their tools to merge svn branch changes into a buildbot 
trunk working copy (a simple 'chbranch project branchdir ; unbranch project'), 
and run the tests. Afterwards you'd need to revert the trunk working copy changes.


Albert