[Buildbot-devel] Going beyond the tutorial; ideas for simplifying larger configurations

[Dan Kegel]

The buildbot manual is good - better than, say, the cmake manual -
but it's still hard for beginners when faced with largish buildbot
configurations to make sense of them.
The tutorial helps, but it stops at a very simple configuration.

I just joined a group that maintains eight or so related
projects (one core library, and seven apps that use it).
They use one buildbot for each of the projects.
Over time, evidently the configuration got unruly,
so they wrote a central configuration library that did the
bulk of the work for master.cfg.
Adding a new project to the central config is
difficult because that central configuration ilbrary
needs changes in about eight different areas to add
one new project.
Also, there was no simple script that automated
creating/installing the many masters and slaves.
(As I whittle away at these problems, I get the feeling that
I could take what I'm learning and do a larger example
for the tutorial.  No promises, though.)

Before I dive in and turn our central config library inside out,
has anyone got advice about structuring medium-sized
buildbot configurations?  I've been looking at the Chromium buildbot
configuration for ideas
http://www.chromium.org/developers/testing/chromium-build-infrastructure
For instance, http://lackingrhoticity.blogspot.com/2011/08/fixing-trouble-with-buildbot.html
describes one of their ideas.
Any other good sources?
- Dan