[Buildbot-devel] A question about multiple changes

[Charles Lepple]

On May 16, 2012, at 4:23 AM, A.T.Hofkamp wrote:

> On 05/16/2012 10:16 AM, Eric Zhu wrote:
>> Hi there,
>> 
>> I am using buildbot as my CI tool. I have a question about multiple changes.
>> Hope anyone can help me. Thanks.
>> 
>> I use git repository to manage my code and use git_buildbot.py to send changes
>> to buildbot. Recently I find if multiple changes are sent, buildbot only buids
>> the first and the last changes.
> 
> Iirc, there is a timeout setting in the scheduler for this:
> 
> From the "scheduling builds" manual section:
> 
> Many schedulers can be configured to wait a while after seeing a source-code change - this is the 
> tree stable timer. The timer allows multiple commits to be "batched" together. This is particularly 
> useful in distributed version control systems, where a developer may push a long sequence of changes 
> all at once. To save resources, it's often desirable only to test the most recent change.


This is part of the story, but there is another place where you can control how build requests get merged:

   http://buildbot.net/buildbot/docs/latest/manual/cfg-global.html#cfg-mergeRequests

   http://buildbot.net/buildbot/docs/latest/manual/cfg-builders.html#merging-build-requests

Going back to the original scenario, if you prefer separate results for changes 1, 2, 3 and 4, you can configure Buildbot to not merge the requests (see above).

If you want to save a bit of time in the long run (with slightly more delay before a build is triggered), you might want to use the tree stable timer that Albert mentioned, so that the scheduler has time to see changes 2, 3 and 4 after 1 comes in. In this case, the default request merge settings should work.

-- 
Charles Lepple
clepple at gmail