[Buildbot-devel] Configuring and using the TryScheduler

[Patrick LeGresley]

I've just started using Buildbot and have setup a few basic schedulers
that are working well.  Very cool thing to have for the work I'm doing
and now I've been playing around with "buildbot try" in conjunction
with SVN.  I've been having some trouble getting this part to work and
wanted to share what I found and see if maybe I could contribute some
patches.

The main problem I've had I eventually found was related to a failure
to find the top of the tree.  In the documentation it says you can put
a .buildbot-top file at top of tree so I thought this was already
setup as a default name for that file (although I also saw where the
name of this file could also be overridden).  Note that I'm using
version 0.7.9.  On line 392 of tryclient.py the name of the file is
determined:

topfile = self.getopt("try-topfile", "try_topfile")

This is coming back None since there doesn't seem to be a default
value of ".buildbot-top" as the documentation seems to say.  I tried
using --try-topfile as mentioned in the documentation but that wasn't
recognized as a valid option.  Neither was the --try-topdir command.
I've changed the line above to:

topfile = self.getopt("try-topfile", "try_topfile", default='.buildbot-top')

which seems to result in the default behavior the documentation implied to me.

Also, the documentation said if try couldn't find the top of directory
it would abort with an error message but all I got was a nasty looking
traceback.  I wasn't sure how to generate a useful error message and
accept the options mentioned in the documentation but if someone could
point me in the right direction I could work on making that part more
user friendly.

Thanks,

Patrick