[Buildbot-devel] How to create sub-columns for each buildslaves under the same builders in waterfall

[Charles Lepple]

On Jan 26, 2010, at 9:22 PM, Dustin J. Mitchell wrote:

> I think your first question should be: is the waterfall the best view?
>
> For most purposes, either the console or one of the grids is the most
> useful display - they show the things developers are interested in -
> commits and builds - while omitting the things that developers don't
> care for - relative timing of various steps.

As someone who used to run Buildbot on a 30+ minute build, the  
waterfall is the most useful way to visualize *progress* on the build  
(rather than a simple pass/fail status). We used the individual step  
labels, as well as a custom status procedure that kept track of the  
last directory that the build process descended into. The build  
process also kept running after errors ("make -k"; not my decision) so  
this was the easiest way to see if a large chunk of code was being  
skipped over due to failed dependencies.

I would agree that the waterfall is not the best place to start  
hacking if you are new to Buildbot and Python, but I also hope that  
the waterfall doesn't start to fall by the wayside just because there  
are a few more high-level summary views.