[Buildbot-devel] Buildbot at Loopt

[Steve 'Ashcrow' Milner]

On 06/03/09 07:20 -0800, Ian Peters-Campbell wrote:
>Hey everyone,
>
>I thought you might like to know, Loopt (www.loopt.com) is now using
>Buildbot for our client builds.  We've got a single buildmaster running
>under CentOS, managing builds for the Loopt client on 4 platforms and dozens
>of handsets.  We're using Loopt for Android, Brew, iPhone, and J2ME projects
>across several carriers (AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint, MetroPCS, etc.)
>
>Our system is using Buildbot both for continuous integration, doing quick
>sanity builds after check-in, but also allows our teams to each have an IRC
>chatroom for their project and order builds through there.  It hasn't been
>up and online for too long, but so far people seem to like it a lot.
>
>We're using Buildbot 0.7.9 with a few thousand lines of custom code.   The
>major portions of custom code do the following:
>
>- Took configuration out of master.cfg and put it into a buildbot.cfg and a
>series of <project>.proj files, all of which are in YAML.  I then wrote a
>parser which reads in the configuration dictionaries and creates the
>buildbot objects (poller, schedulers, builders, factories, bots, email
>notifiers, buildslves, etc.)  For me this has several advantages: it allows
>people who don't know Python to modify and add projects and builds much more
>easily, it vastly reduces duplication of information in configuration, and
>generally makes the code cleaner (at least to my eye.)
>
>- Wrote what I can only call a Factory factory, which creates, populates,
>and returns a factory based on the configuration values of the individual
>builders.  Again, this cuts down on a lot of duplicate code.
>
>- Extended the IRC bot to take build properties on the force build line, so
>users can now, for instance, say:
>iPhoneBot: force build iPhone-release because I said so --conf=Debug
>
>Basically when the force line is being parsed, I spin through the "reason"
>portion of the line and strip out any words which are prepended with --.
>These are then split into key/value pairs (if possible) and added to the
>build's properties.  This allows us to have a single builder per code
>branch, but order builds for individual handsets, pointing at a variety of
>servers, turning debug on or off, etc.
>
>- Added a HistoryTracker, which keeps track of which ordered (not CI) builds
>were successful, and attaches the branch's SVN logs from the current head
>back to the branch's last successfgul ordered build (though the bounds can
>be modified through flags to the bot.)  This history is then attached to the
>build's outgoing emails, so that our SVN history acts as an explicitly
>passed set of raw release notes to QA, etc.
>
>- Fleshed out the "passing" build type in the mail notifier, since the code
>was mostly there already.  Since if we are doing a packaged (ordered) build
>it goes to a wider audience, and since we don't care to notify the non-dev
>portions of that audience if the build fails, we often only want the
>notifier to fire off mail if the build succeeds.
>
>- added defaults to getProperty calls
>
>There are a few other tweaks, but that's the stuff that jumps to mind.  I
>haven't patched any of this into the main code-base, but I hope to do some
>of that over the next couple of weeks (at least the passing notifier and the
>getProperty calls.)  I hope I'll have call to remain involved in the
>Buildbot community in the future and that I'll be able to contribute some to
>the march of progress.
>
>Anyhow enough of my taking up your time, but I thought you might all like to
>hear about another up-and-running Buildbot system :)
>
>Ian

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That is awesome! I can't wait to see some patches that come through
related to your work esp since I am a fan of YAML :-D.

-- 
kthxbye!
Steve 'Ashcrow' Milner
Agent of Infosec
IRC: ashcrow
GnuPG ID: 28DFD4BE

"In the heat of conversation I may have said certain things I believe 
to be untrue. The alleged lie that you might have heard me saying 
allegedly moments ago ... thats a parasite that lives in my neck." 
     -- Tad Ghostal
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