[Buildbot-devel] Buildbot 1.0: The Shimmering Vision

[John Koleszar]

On Wed, 2008-08-06 at 13:07 -0400, Dustin J. Mitchell wrote:
> What will 1.0 look like, from a user's perspective?  Let's hash this
> out on the list, come up with a brief description, and then put it on
> the wiki and lay out some milestones to get there.
> 

Hi,

I've been loosely following buildbot for a little while because it seems
like the closest project to fitting my needs, but there's enough that
I'd have to build myself that I haven't taken the plunge. So here's a
short list of things I think buildbot lacks. To be fair, some of these
may reflect a lack of understanding of the current version, so take with
a grain of salt. 

First, some background: I do embedded systems development, so the
systems I compile on are usually different from those I test on, and the
environment from one target to another - CPUs, operating systems,
libraries, etc - is completely different.

1) Finer granularity of the concept of a "build", particularly with
respect to the distinction between compiling and testing. I don't want
more than one job compiling at once (on a given machine), but if the
testing is to be performed on another host, I don't want to wait for the
tests to complete before I start compiling the next job in the queue.
However, a post-test job would probably run on a build host, but there's
probably no requirement that it be the same host that did the build,
assuming #2 below exists.

2) A mechanism for distributing build artifacts (eg the compiled
application) to test machines (could also distribute to other build
hosts)

3) A simple, stable, public, wire protocol for test clients - polling
for tests to run, downloading build artifacts, reporting test results,
etc. I'm thinking something like HTTP with a easy to parse plaintext
content. That would be easy to integrate with a web-app front end. It
should be simple to write a test client in plain C with no library
dependencies (no xml-rpc) - running a python program on many of my
targets is out of the question.

Just a few ideas.

Br,

John