[Buildbot-devel] celebrating 10,000 downloads of Buildbot

[Brian Warner]

I just checked the sf.net download stats page[1], and sometime yesterday
morning it logged the ten thousandth download of Buildbot.

Wow! When I started this project four and a half years ago, I had no idea it
would ever grow to be this popular. Some more stats: We have 204 members on
an active, helpful mailing list, with something like 100 messages a month
(even after we dealt with the spam problem). New users are getting help and
good answers to their questions even without my involvement. We've got a
shiny new Trac instance[2], with 51 active tickets (and another 67 on sf.net,
maybe 10 of which are duplicates). My best guess is that Buildbots are in use
in at least 200 sites all over the world. I know of Buildbots being used to
improve software quality in an astonishing variety of fields: computer games,
astronomical image processing, financial analysis tools, movie rendering,
embedded systems, web browsers, packet sniffers, databases, desktop widget
libraries, version control systems, streaming media toolkits, compilers,
academic administration tools, spam checkers, plate tectonics analysis
software, and office productivity applications.

Google reports 428000 hits for the word "buildbot". A google search designed
to locate public waterfall pages ('buildbot "working for the" project "last
build"') shows 268 hits.

Recently there has been a huge burst of amazing patches coming out of the
community, complete with unit tests and documentation updates. I've started
the countdown towards the long-overdue 0.7.6 release[3], which should be out
by the end of the month. It should have new web status pages, better slave
concurrency support, and maybe even that HTML refresh feature that people
have been clamoring for. The future is even brighter: IM status delivery,
better branch support, build status in databases, all sorts of cool stuff.

There are even vague plans afoot to host a Buildbot User's Group meeting in
the San Francisco bay area later this summer.. I think we have enough local
users to make it work. Stay tuned.

And finally, somebody is even *paying money* (in the form of buying AdSense
keywords) to encourage people to migrate *away* from buildbot to another
system. If that's not the definition of success, I don't know what is[4] :-).

So anyways, I just wanted to thank the hundreds of hackers, developers,
users, and promoters of Buildbot everywhere who have made this milestone
possible. Our humble project has grown from a hastily cobbled-together
presentation at PyCon 2003 to a large and healthy open-source community.
Today it's 10,000 downloads.. just imagine how soon we'll get to 100,000![5]

tomorrow, the world!
 -Brian



[1]: https://sourceforge.net/project/stats/detail.php?group_id=73177&ugn=buildbot&type=prdownload&mode=alltime&package_id=0
[2]: http://buildbot.net/
[3]: http://buildbot.net/trac/milestone/0.7.6
[4]: mind you, somebody else is paying even more money to entice buildbot
     users to visit a web site that sells cigar boxes (aka tinderboxes), so
     maybe this isn't quite the definition of success that one might hope for
[5]: my non-scientific extrapolation suggests March 2011. Maybe we should
     start a betting pool..