[Buildbot-devel] Has anyone looked at changing buildbot to use ssh to connect to the slaves?

[Chad Reese]

Greetings,

I've just setup my first buildbot server with a few slaves. The
documentation was quite good, and I've got useful builds. One thing I
don't quite understand is the need for buildbot to have anything
installed on the slave machine. Since each build step boils down to a
remote shell command, why doesn't buildbot just use ssh?

For every slave you need to specify a name and password. It seems it
would be easy for the base shell command class to expect slave names of
the form "user at host" and either use key authentication or the supplied
slave password. ssh gives you both stdout and stderr as separate
streams. scp could easily transfer files to implement the file
upload/download steps. Pinging a slave could simply perform a "ssh
user at slave echo Alive". Environment variables can be passed with "ssh
host NAME=VALUE command ...".

I obviously don't know anything about the internals of buidbot, but this
seems like it would greatly simplify setting up slaves. Most machines
don't have twisted or buildbot installed, but they do have ssh.

I searched trac and the mailing list archive and didn't see anything
talking about this.

Chad