[Buildbot-devel] the value of buildbot CI with a readonly source repository?

[Charles Lepple]

On May 29, 2010, at 9:49 AM, Robert P. J. Day wrote:

>  as i understand it, the whole point of CI is to add hooks to VC
> checkins to trigger builds when someone makes a commit.  but if we're
> talking about the kernel source repo, i really can't do anything
> beyond just manually pulling to update whenever i want, at which
> point continuous integration doesn't make much sense, does it?

I'm certainly no authority on CI, but my experience with it has shown  
that building is only half the battle.

It's subtle, but the last step on each of the metabuildbot builds is a  
test phase:

    http://buildbot.net/metabuildbot/ (several options from here; the  
waterfall shows them all at once)

Since you can script up just about anything in a Buildbot step, you  
are not limited to just building and testing. You can track all sorts  
of metrics, such as SLOC and executable size. Or you could run static  
analysis tools on the code.

Going back to your original scenario, you might not get much out of  
pulling the Linux kernel if you just want to see if it builds  
(especially given the combinatorial explosion of configuration  
options). If you are looking for more than a build system, then you  
might be well served by picking a project which has a similar  
structure to the codebase you eventually intend to use with Buildbot.

-- 
Charles Lepple