[Buildbot-devel] Comparing Buildbot with Jenkins: ease of setup issues

[Dan Kegel]

Hi folks,
a 70 developer c++ shop around here has been using Buildbot,
but is considering switching to Jenkins.

As a hiring test, they have applicants write a tiny C++ app,
set up a trivial apt repository, have the C++ app's Makefile build
a .deb package and push it to the apt repository,
set up a git repository, set up a Jenkins instance, and
configure Jenkins to build the C++ app when somebody checks in
a change.  And guess what?  Jenkins isn't the hard part, and
the result is a really slick web interface.

Looking around for comparisons between the two systems,
the first two good quotes I found were:

http://markunsworth.com/2012/01/
"it seems that people with experience of both would suggest using Jenkins
first until you realise it can’t do something that you really need BB for as it
can be quite painful to get set up; Jenkins on the other hand is very
simple to get set up."

and:
http://www.gimpusers.com/forums/gimp-developer/13283-nightly-builds-moved-to-jenkins-hudson
"[Jenkins is] An order of magnitude easier to configure and maintain. All
configuration happens through the web interface.  ...
* Mails with last build log lines and list of changes since last
build works out of the box. That is quite a bit of work to get
working with buildbot, so much that I gave up on it"

I see from recent chatter on this list that Buildbot is
planning to offer a web 2.0 style interface in the future,
that should help some.

I wonder how hard it would be to add a web front end
to manage simple buildbot configurations, to address
the "Jenkins is easier to set up for simple projects"
problem.
- Dan