[Buildbot-devel] 0.7.x community?

[Dustin J. Mitchell]

On Tue, May 29, 2012 at 6:42 PM, Axel Hecht <l10n.moz at googlemail.com> wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
> I'm trying to bring two lines-of-thought together, starting from my
> 0.7.x-based infrastructure.
>
> I recently learned that there are more folks than just me that are stuck on
> 0.7.x.
>
> I understand that getting off of 0.7.x is a rewrite of my own infra for
> 0.8.x, and one for 0.9.x. Plus, I'd need to get patches written or accepted,
> notably on http://trac.buildbot.net/ticket/1053 (tables need IDs for some
> infras) and integration testing. Haven't evaluated what I'd need to get into
> 0.9.x, tbh.
>
> Both (or all three) of these makes me wonder if there are more folks that
> are just fine with 0.7.x, and would still like to collaborate on bug fixes
> and improvements on that code base?

I'm happy to see you lead the charge to maintain the 0.7.x series.  In
fact, I'd love to have a similar person for the 0.8.x series after
0.9.0 is out.  I'll be happy to bless any releases and forward-port
patches where appropriate.  I'll be curious to see what sort of
audience you find -- my impression is that folks on 0.7.12 and earlier
are mostly in the it-just-works category, so I'm not sure a 0.7.13
release will be of any more interest than the pending 0.8.7 release.

I do have two concerns:

Be careful not to fork the project.  0.7.x should be bugfix releases,
and possibly include backports of features also present on 0.8.x or
0.9.x.  If 0.7.x starts growing new features, then we have a new
product, and our community's efforts are divided, which does nobody
any good.

Maintenance should not influence new development.  Any new Buildbot
features should be implemented against the latest version, without
concern for ease of backporting.  Similarly, new 0.7.x releases should
be fully forward-compatible with 0.8.x releases, both for master
upgrades and master/slave communication.  No changes on master should
be required for compatibility with new 0.7.x releases.

I'm aware that upgrading a Buildbot instance with custom code can be
difficult.  This is mostly because the APIs against which such code is
written were ad-hoc, undocumented, and poorly implemented.  It's also
due to the lack of development and staging instances in most Buildbot
deployments, making an upgrade difficult to test; and to the divided
attentions of most build / release engineers.  As a result, we've got
users stalled on just about every release -- 0.8.3 seems particularly
popular, as do 0.7.10 and 0.7.12.

The 0.9.x project goes a long way toward defining the major APIs in a
future-compatible fashion, and the goal for the 1.0.0 release is to
complete the transition to a build/test/release *framework*, in the
sense that APIs at all levels are well-defined and can be used to
build complex, custom applications.  Work on all of this is
proceeding, if slowly, but it's important that we keep that momentum
going.

Dustin

P.S. To be clear, 0.9.x isn't released yet, so there's no basis for
evaluating the upgrade options.  But if you have a lot of customized
code on 0.7.x, then yes, that will probably be a big upgrade.