[Buildbot-devel] Try Change using Perforce Shelves

[Dustin J. Mitchell]

On Wed, Apr 7, 2010 at 11:48 AM, Will Wilson <lantictac at gmail.com> wrote:
> What we're *really* missing is a way to use the console with our
> system - when several users are making builds concurrently the
> waterfall just becomes too messy. The problem is the existing console
> display is based on revisions, but in this case although we have a
> Change object it doesn't have a "proper" revision associated with it.
> So I was wondering if it might be reasonable to use the change_id to
> uniquely link changes to builds rather than relying upon the revision.
> Would this be a practical solution while still keeping the correct
> behaviour for everyone else?

That's *almost* the correct solution, but not quite.

Think of a Change as a notification -- hey, there's new code
available!  Changes get transmuted to SourceStamps which (when they
are absolute) represent a specific, theoretically reproducable copy of
the source code.  So really, all of the status displays should be
displaying a succinct description of the SourceStamp.  That works
great for some VC's (Subversion), OK for some (Git), and really badly
for others (Darcs).  I suspect the solution for the places where it
*doesn't* work well is to come up with some unique id (maybe
timestamp?), and add links and popups that can give a fuller
"revision".

What do you think?

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