[Buildbot-devel] Multi-repo and repo-caches on slave-side

[Dustin J. Mitchell]

OK, I think I'm going to have to drop the hammer here, with due apologies.

I can count well over a dozen notions of how source code should be
checked out, just for Subversion.  And there are almost a dozen other
VC's.  So we have at least 30-40 conflicting use-cases here, if not
more.

If this is going to change at all, it needs to be done in light of a
*comprehensive* survey of the supported modes for each VC and the
desired behaviors.  It will need to support changing branches, and not
explode in the face of changing repositories.  It should be done in
such a way that minimizes the likelihood of changing existing
behavior, whether accidentally or intentionally.  And it should be
done in such a way that as many use-cases as possible (like 28-38 of
them..) are supported.  Oh, and it should be integration tested, with
a test for each use-case.

That's a high bar, I know!

One thing that may help is to think of creating a new set of Source
steps, completely unrelated to the current set.  Then you get
backward-compatibility for free.  The rest is still hard, though.

The key bug on the topic is bug #699.

Dustin

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