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

[Georges Racinet]

On 08/29/2012 04:03 AM, Dustin J. Mitchell wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 28, 2012 at 12:59 AM, Tom Prince<tom.prince at ualberta.net>  wrote:
>> 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.
>
> The danger in having one "preferred" method is that we pick it too
> soon.  You pointed to three *very* different approaches to this
> problem, and there are lots of others.  At least initially, I'd like
> to have a number of frameworks to choose from -- just as there are a
> number of Python web frameworks out there.  If one turns out to be the
> clear winner -- and there are a number of characteristics to judge on
> -- then we can at least make it "recommended", and perhaps include it
> in the main distribution too.
>
> I don't like using big words like "ecosystem", but I think that's what
> I'm looking for here.

Hi, just a word to say that I really like the way it's been presented at 
some point in this thread : that Buildbot is a framework to build CI 
bots, rather than a ready-made one. And indeed, with patience, one can 
do almost anything with Buildbot. That's a real advantage.

My own experience with the tutorial (as a fairly new user) is that its 
barebone nature leads to get a quick grasp of the concepts, and that's 
exactly what I needed to get started… to write eventually the kind of 
configurator that's been mentioned earlier in this thread (for 
OpenERP-based applications in our case). But it looked so stripped-down 
that I didn't feel the need to try it -- and discover that buildbot was 
more powerful than I thought.

In my experience with other systems, configuration files for tools 
intending to be generic tend to become bloated and much more complicated 
than programmatic configuration. When it appears, everyone's happy, 
because people tend to think code is more complicated than 
configuration. Over the years, the configuration format has to 
accommodate more and more use-cases and becomes quite intricated.

To summarize, I'd be all in favor of a series of standard, officially 
endorsed configurators (with web UI) for clearly delimited cases, while 
resisting the pression to bloat : new use-cases should either stay 
programmatic, or become new configurators on a per-case basis.

Regards,
-- 
Georges Racinet
Anybox SAS, http://anybox.fr
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