[Buildbot-devel] RFC: using buildbot to manage crowd-sourced testing.

[Stefan Seefeld]

Dustin,

On 01/12/2013 11:54 AM, Dustin J. Mitchell wrote:
> I'd love to see Buildbot move in this direction.  There are a bunch of
> cloud providers out there providing free build/test services to open
> source apps, but they're all using Jenkins.  That's a shame!

I'm glad to hear that. Now that you are looking for project ideas for
GSoC 2013, is there a way we could flesh this out into chunks that may
be worth of GSoC projects ?
I'm not sure how much I could contribute myself, other than providing
detailed use-cases.

One thing I'd like to see is the ability to move from a master-centric
environment (where the master process pushes builds to the build slaves,
controlled by a scheduler), to a slave-centric environment where the
slave asks for builds, and returns the result whenever they are available.

A related (but slightly independent) task is to support a somewhat
different authentication model, where slaves don't have to be known by
the master upfront. (This may obviously limit the type of data to be
returned securely to the master once the build is complete.)

The overall use-case I have in mind is volunteer computing, where
contributors donate a slice of their compute power to run pre-defined
tasks ("builds") managed in a central buildbot setup. So instead of
centrally scheduling builds, the build master would rather provide a
builder that a build slave would request and execute, returning the
results once complete.
(The builder would be pre-packaged, perhaps even with a full development
/ build environment, so all the contributor has to do is download and
install a single package, then configure how much resources he wants to
donate, etc. The builder would also include various checks to validate
the build environment on the contributor's machine, to make sure the
build results can be properly aggregated at the end.)

I think this would be a nice extension of existing buildbot use cases,
though I haven't yet thought about how to split the required work into
incremental projects, and in particular, how to cast them into GSoC
projects.

Thoughts ?

        Stefan

-- 

      ...ich hab' noch einen Koffer in Berlin...