[Buildbot-devel] Buildbot 1.0: The Shimmering Vision

[Dan Kegel]

On Thu, Aug 14, 2008 at 8:42 AM, Dustin J. Mitchell <dustin at zmanda.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 14, 2008 at 11:34 AM, Dan Kegel <dank at kegel.com> wrote:
>> a) is adapted to watching a -patches (as opposed to -commits) mailing list
>
> That is *neat*!

[I've posted recently, but just noticed this old thread, and am
following up for closure's sake.]

I kind of dropped this for a couple years, but felt guilty two months ago
and got it working using buildbot; it's up at http://buildbot.kegel.com

Of my wish list from back then, two items seem done:
- load balancing
- a patch-centric report (the transposed grid mostly suffices)

One item was worked around with local scripts:
- a mailing list watcher / try --diff combination adapted to watching
a -patches (as opposed to -commits) mailing list

And two items turned out to not be so important, thanks to ccache, and
the fact that testing is slower than building for my project:
- supporting patch series efficiently by reusing build from previous
patch in series
- supporting tries efficiently by reusing build from clean tree

In retrospect, I think the thing that was really missing back then was
a good buildbot tutorial.  I just couldn't figure out how to set the damn
thing up, and chromium.org's config (which I had used in practice) was
not a gentle introduction.  Thankfully the current tutorial is pretty good,
especially now that it documents how to set up a try server :-)

Most of the effort in getting the bot going has been in tracking
down and eliminating sources of spurious failure reports, none
of which are buildbot's fault.  I've only had to patch buildbot a
little (to disable patch attachments to result emails,
to add patch descriptions to the transposed matrix,
to increase the default length of the grid,
to increase the max size of patches, and
to use git to apply patches).
It would be nice to be able to use an unpatched buildbot, but
it's probably asking to much for buildbot to work for all project
unchanged out of the box.
It would also be nice if one didn't have to read the source to
find answers to questions about how to use buildbot, but
again, that's probably asking a bit much.

Thanks for such a useful tool, and for responding promptly to the bugs
I've filed so far!
- Dan