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

[Dan Kegel]

On Tue, Aug 21, 2012 at 12:42 AM, John Carr <johnmdcarr at me.com> wrote:
> I was faced with lots of projects under a single master and there was a
> large amount of copy and paste. There were lots of stakeholders who might
> want to update the configuration but they don't (and can't) have access. So
> I wrote this:
>
> https://github.com/Jc2k/buildbot_travis

I remember seeing the honey bear peeking out before, and have been
waiting for it to be ready to try :-)

> I've ended up adapting and reusing one of the functions from travis in a
> couple of projects. Basically, given a repository, project name and list of
> steps you could have a function that sets up a BuildFactory, BuilderConfig,
> Poller, Scheduler, ChangeFilter and all the other boring stuff. So I have
> started:
>
> https://github.com/Jc2k/buildbot_patterns
>...
> build_on_commit(c,
>     name = "buildbot",
>     repository = "git://github.com/buildbot/buildbot",
>     steps = [
>         "virtualenv --no-site-packages .",
>         "bin/python setup.py develop",
>         "bin/pip install mock",
>         "bin/trial buildbot",
>         ]
>     slaves = ['windows-1', 'windows-2']
>     )

I like the idea of buildbot_patterns.  Something that reduces the
amount of scripting for simple cases by a factor of 4 or so would
make the buildbot learning curve a lot less steep.

> We use buildout heavily so I deploy our buildbots with buildout.

wow.  buildout appears to be for people who are already so
far down some python-related rabbit hole it's hard to relate to.
It seems that the talks all assume that everything that came
before python is horrible, and that everybody already knows
what buildout is.  I'm sure I'll agree it's great once I get over
how alien it is, and how the lightning talk calls the tools
I'm familiar with 'horrible'.
- Dan