[Buildbot-devel] Buildbot 1.0: The Shimmering Vision

John Earl jearl at airsource.co.uk
Mon Aug 11 17:25:09 UTC 2008


Dustin J. Mitchell wrote:
> The conflict I'm seeing here is between buildbot as a flexible,
> general framework for continuous integration testing (capable of
> supporting all of the weird uses we've seen in this thread so far) and
> buildbot as a well-defined (and thus necessarily limited) application
> which has knobs that can be spun via web.  The framework idea implies,
> to me, that buildbot configurations are actually programs, which means
> they aren't really editable (except via a <textarea>, I suppose) via
> the web.
>
> The means I see for avoiding this conflict is to provide some tools
> for building administrative interfaces, and ship a basic
> trigger-these-builds-on-every-commit configuration which includes an
> administrative interface.  Then folks who can get by with the basic
> configuration get a web interface, and folks with more advanced
> configuration needs can either roll their own administrative interface
> or forgo it entirely.
>   

We have one master and a *lot* of builders, so +1 on a nicer user 
interface for filtering information on builders or subsets of builders. 
Even little things like letting builders be in more than one category 
would help.

Our work is mostly consulting, and the build system can vary between 
target platforms or between clients, so I fairly often find myself 
writing new buildsteps. Because time is limited they don't do a great 
deal on the output-formatting side, and could be a lot better. Therefore 
+1 on more stock build steps with output formatting / filtering, to 
which we'd probably contribute.

We like it that buildbot configurations are programs. I imagine it would 
be nice for debugging/initial setup if schedulers, and builders and 
their steps, exposed tweakable parameters to the admin interface, 
changes to which could be cached and (optionally) re-applied after a 
reconfig. One could imagine, for instance, temporarily disabling a 
certain buildstep in a builder from the web interface, or modifying a 
buildstep's environment. A way to display the changes as python code 
which you could copy-paste-edit into your build config to make it 
permanent would complete the feature. But as to building your whole 
configuration from the admin interface--- from our perspective that 
would be overkill.

John

-- 
Dr John Earl - Engineer
Airsource Ltd





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