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

[Tom Prince]

"Dustin J. Mitchell" <dustin at v.igoro.us> writes:

> 2. As John has implemented, a config frontend built on top of the
> existing configuration system, linked in like Pierre's example.
> Multiple, competing implementations are fine here.  I think it'd
> probably be best to distribute these separately from Buildbot itself,
> but I'm happy to put them in the Buildbot github organization and
> treat them as Buildbot projects.  The main docs should point to them.

Personally, I'd like some declarative configuration method to become the
preferred method for configuring buildbot. I'm not suggesting getting
rid of the current configuration tools, but rather than be the primary
method of configuring builbot, they are the plumbing used to create the
primary method.

I think most larege configs probably effectively follow this model to a
reasonable degere in an adhoc way currently:
- metabuildbot (https://github.com/buildbot/metabbotcfg) has number of
  generic factories (and factory factories?) that configure builders
  based on declared properties of the various slaves available
- twisted (https://bazaar.launchpad.net/~exarkun/twisted-buildbot-configuration/trunk/view/head:/master/master.cfg)
  defines a bunch of steps and factories, and then creates a bunch of
  builders from those
- mozilla (https://hg.mozilla.org/build/buildbot-configs/file/c0113ade33ab/mozilla/)
  I'm not very familiar with mozilla's buildbot infrastructure but the
  above looks very much like a declarative config.

I'm not suggesting that everybody uses the same style of declarative
config. Simply that buildbot should evolve towards providing clean
seperation between the declarative and executable (and testable?) parts of the config,
and tools to handle that.

  Tom