[Buildbot-devel] Waterfall display out of order

[Dustin J. Mitchell]

On Thu, Mar 15, 2012 at 10:25 PM, Thomas Middeldorp
<thomas at ranzer.geek.nz> wrote:
> I had a poke around and I believe the previous functionality of preserving
> the builder order can be achieved with the attached patch (at least it seems
> to work for me).
>
> If you can think of any problems with doing it this way please let me know.
>
> If you decide to use this change you'll probably want to revert commit
> ddd9f8dc4b34f93e48b38d1c85c32e50858eede6 (assuming that's actually the
> commit ID, I'm not familiar with git) - the one that uses sorted() on the
> builder names in buildbot/status/master.py since that would now be
> counter-productive.

It's interesting that this has become a common issue.  At no point did
Buildbot guarantee this behavior, so there was no need for a release
note (in fact, I didn't realize it was a change until people asked
about it).  Furthermore, as we get to a more distributed-master
architecture, the set of available builders will no longer be defined
in a single list -- it will be all builders supported by all masters
in the cluster.

All of which is to say, if you're depending on this behavior, the
included patch is adequate for the time being, but find another way to
get your desired behavior, as it won't always work.  The best solution
is probably to name your builders such that they sort lexically into
the desired order.

Dustin