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

[Eli Carter]

Thanks for responding.

> 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.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean here...  As far as merge tactics
go, it's merging the branch back to the development line it was branched
from.  It's tedious, but straightforward.

> 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.

If that were the case, buildbot wouldn't have step.SVN.  :)  Since
buildbot has extensions for doing source checkouts and patches against
that source, doing a checkout and merge (i.e. a patch from the source
control system) fits buildbot's scope very well.

> 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.

I'm expecting merge conflicts to be fairly common, at least with some files.

> 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.

I'm setting a .buildbot-merged file in the source tree in the same way
that the patch operation does so the working copy changes get wiped out as
needed.

Eli