[Buildbot-devel] Notes from Thursday's Meeting - 0.8.1 plans

[Christian Unger]

On 02.05.2010, at 22:03, Dustin J. Mitchell wrote:

> Murali brought up the idea of providing Buildbot configuration in some
> structured format other than Python, giving the relationship between
> builds that are required.  He also mentioned putting a web-based,
> drag-and-drop GUI on top of this format.  I suggested that it's
> already quite possible for users to generate Buildbot configuration
> from structured data (by parsing that data in the master.cfg).  I also
> said that a configuration GUI would be interesting, but will not be a
> part of Buildbot, because it would of necessity reduce the flexibility
> of the configuration.  There are already some configuration-generation
> apps out there (notably Loki), and certainly within more narrow
> environments it may even make business sense to provide such a
> frontend.


While the GUI config sounds like a great idea,
describing inter-dependencies between projects is probably not something you want to keep in your buildbot's config only and it is not likely to change on a build-to-build basis.
I for one try to keep the dependency graph as part of the project itself, thus keeping it inside the source repository of the very project, making it possible to track dependency changes over time.
If there was a mechanism for the factory which is run on the slave to be configured on the fly on the base of e.g the source checkout, wouldn't this be a way to avoid double-entry bookkeeping of dependncy definitions? and wouldn't this decrease the need of reconfiguring the whole master just for a change in one slave configuration? 

thoughts?




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cu
christian unger