[Buildbot-devel] database-backed status/scheduler-state project

[Dustin J. Mitchell]

On Tue, Sep 8, 2009 at 3:00 PM, Ben Hearsum<bhearsum at mozilla.com> wrote:
> I disagree. The *trunk* of Buildbot will always be in an unstable
> state. I think that once we hit a certain milestone or state of things
> (1.0, perhaps) there will be a "stable" line, which receives bugfixes,
> non-API changing features, and maybe other things and at least one
> development head where new and exciting things happen.

This is a nice idea, but the problem is that buildbot in particular,
as a Python library with little or no well-defined API or behavior,
will never be able to make any kind of assurances regarding forward or
backward compatibility.  We can fudge that by limiting the
circumstances ("if you follow the config snippets in the documentation
and don't write your own subclasses, your config won't break"), or by
freezing portions of the code (at the obvious cost of preventing
feature development and bugfixes in that code -- for an example of
bugfixes, consider the handling of branches).  Neither of those
options is easy, and neither is a complete solution.

This, not any feeling that the existing code is too mysterious to
comprehend or modify, is what has driven me to want to make a clean
break and start over (the one-oh thing).

Dustin

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