[Buildbot-devel] Thoughts on IRC status delivery

[Greg Ward]

So last week, I blew an hour or two learning how to use this
newfangled "IRC" thing [1] and setting up an IRC server on my
buildmaster, just to see what status delivery over IRC is like.  I
guess I should have read the fine docs first, but it wasn't what I
expected.  The whole notion of sending commands to get back very
specific status reports seems awfully restricted.

Here's what (I think) I really want in
status-delivery-by-instant-message: just tell me what I want to know
without making me ask for it.  I think this can be done with two
modes, "normal" and "verbose".

"Normal" is what you use when your buildbot is up and humming happily
along: tell me every time a build starts, fails, or stops.  Curious
developers and the (human) buildmaster could have that chat window
open all the time.

"Verbose" mode is what you would use when you're actively hacking on
your buildbot: tell me every time a scheduler makes a decision, a
build starts, fails, or stops, or a build step starts or finishes.
This would be very close to "tail -f twistd.log" with all the
unnecessary traffic filtered out.  Alternately, it's like reloading
the waterfall web page constantly, without the load that entails.
(Buildbot is so insanely event-driven that it just feels wrong to
hammer the reload button in my  browser ... but there doesn't seem to
be a better alternative!)

Personally, I'd be perfectly happy selecting between normal and
verbose mode in master.cfg.  But if you want to make it selectable
per-user by IRC commands, go right ahead.

Anyways, feel free to take this idea and run with it.  I *might* hack
on it at some point, but my feelings won't be hurt if someone beats me
to it.

Greg

[1] no really! I've been using the Internet for, umm, 16 years now,
and never used IRC.  After a few minutes on the #apache and #c
channels of freenode.org, I now see that I have missed precisely
nothing.