[Buildbot-devel] Multiple BuildSlaves for one single Builder

[David Leder]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Benoît Allard [mailto:benoit at aeteurope.nl] 
> Sent: 15 September 2008 12:14
> To: David Leder
> Cc: Christian.Lins at Sun.COM; buildbot-devel at lists.sourceforge.net
> Subject: Re: [Buildbot-devel] Multiple BuildSlaves for one 
> single Builder
> 
> David Leder wrote:
> >> David Leder schrieb:
> >>> Hi everyone!
> >>>  
> >>> I have a buildbot setup running the master on a Linux 
> host and on 3 
> >>> platforms (Linux, Solaris, Windows) 3 builders each. Now
> >> what I want
> >>> to do is attaching more linux and solaris slaves to that
> >> builders, so
> >>> I can make parallel builds with the same builder and
> >> buildfactory. I
> >>> read, this is possible, but I'm no more able to find how
> >> this has to
> >>> be configured.
> >>>
> >>> Can somebody give me a hint please? :-)
> >> If I got you right, that's easy.
> >>
> >> Say you have a builder config somewhere in your master 
> config files:
> >>
> >> b1 = {'name', "test",
> >>       'slavename': "mySlave1",
> >>       ...
> >>
> >> Simply replace the slavename line with
> >>
> >>       'slavenames': ["mySlave1", "mySlave2"]
> > 
> > Ha! Bingo! I tried already 'slavename': ["mySlave1", 
> "mySlave2"], but 
> > didn't get the clue to use the PLURAL form of slavenameS :-)
> 
>  From the manual:
> 
> --------------8<----------------
> slavenames
>      If you provide slavenames instead of slavename, you can 
> give a list of buildslaves which are capable of running this 
> Builder. If multiple buildslaves are available for any given 
> Builder, you will have some measure of redundancy: in case 
> one slave goes offline, the others can still keep the Builder 
> working. In addition, multiple buildslaves will allow 
> multiple simultaneous builds for the same Builder, which 
> might be useful if you have a lot of forced or "try" builds 
> taking place.
> 
>      If you use this feature, it is important to make sure 
> that the buildslaves are all, in fact, capable of running the 
> given build. The slave hosts should be configured similarly, 
> otherwise you will spend a lot of time trying 
> (unsuccessfully) to reproduce a failure that only occurs on 
> some of the buildslaves and not the others. Different 
> platforms, operating systems, versions of major programs or 
> libraries, all these things mean you should use separate Builders.
> --------------8<----------------

Thanks for that!

> 
> So, my understanding is that one of the builder will make the 
> work, but not all of them ... (and you won't know which one, 
> thus the warning about the fact that the config has to be the 
> same !) I guess you more likely want to define more builders, 
> and assign them the other slaves.

I will not run in that problems as we use a toolchain which comes
from our source repository (we use Rational Clearcase). And we
always build our "build environment" by hand with our scripts, so
this really should be no issue in my case. But thank you for pointing
this out :-)

Yours, David