[Buildbot-devel] the aftermath (was Re: SF bay area get-together?)

[Dustin J. Mitchell]

On Mon, Aug 4, 2008 at 11:56 AM, Marcus Lindblom <macke at yar.nu> wrote:
> In fact, Django's model-api is so easy & cool I think it would be very
> easy to add extra data (metrics, whatnot) to builds from custom build
> steps or other tools.
>
> Would that be feasible? We could still use Twisted for the HTTP part,
> but use DB/template system from django for storage & presentation?
>
> Or am I completely out of line? ;)

I've been reading about and playing with Django, too, and I agree that
it has a great design -- and not just in its database API.  What
Twisted gives us that Django does *not*, however, is the asynchronous
communication paradigm and the excellent RPC library.  I don't know
how feasible it would be to mix the two, but I imagine that it would
cause some pain.

This begs a larger question, though.  The user-group meeting seems to
have spawned some wide-ranging thoughts, and I've been having my own
thoughts about how to make bbot more generalized, abstract, and deeply
configurable.  We need to be careful not to fall into the trap of
alienating the application's userbase in order to build the best
mousetrap.  We should have a serious conversation, led (I think) by
Brian as to how to handle backward compatibility and future design
work *before* we get into talking about the technical details.

So before I or anyone else stand up to say "let's abandon XYZ," I'd
like to hear from Brian -- since he probably wrote XYZ. :)

What will Buildbot look like?

Dustin

-- 
Storage Software Engineer
http://www.zmanda.com