[Buildbot-devel] How many VCS does buildbot support?

[Dustin J. Mitchell]

On Mon, Jul 6, 2009 at 10:43 PM, Charles Lepple<clepple at gmail.com> wrote:
> If the notion of patching Buildbot for a not-so-popular VCS is not
> desirable, then the potential problems from a plugin interface might
> not be much better.

Well, the advantage is that it isolates the maintenance.  If there's a
bbot-clearcase project on github that hasn't had a commit in 2 years
and doesn't really work, it's easy for me to say "well, patch the
plugn!", but if it's in the buildbot repo, then at some point I have
to either find a copy of clearcase and fix the implementation, or
delete it from the codebase.  It's more of a social distinction than a
technical one.

> With the Buildbot source tree in Git, it shouldn't be too hard to
> maintain a fork on GitHub (or even hosted somewhere else) to support
> other VCSes. The maintainers for those forks would still need to keep
> tabs on Buildbot trunk developments.

I can see forks becoming a problem in a few ways.  First, in general
they would all end up being called "buildbot", so users would have to
wonder, "well, is Jon's version of Buildbot similar to the main
Buildbot version 0.7.14?"  Also, what if a user wants functionality
from two forks?  In general, this shifts too much of the burden onto
the user.

Dustin

-- 
Open Source Storage Engineer
http://www.zmanda.com