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

Stefan Seefeld stefan at seefeld.name
Sun Feb 17 05:52:09 UTC 2013


Hi Dustin,

On 02/16/2013 05:02 PM, Dustin J. Mitchell wrote:
> Yes, this sounds great.  In particular, I think volunteer computing
> could be a real strength for Buildbot.

I'm glad you agree.

[...]

> So, I think the way forward here is for people from the Buildbot
> community to do the initial design and plot out the implementation
> process.  Then bits of that process can be broken out as GSoC tasks,
> as long as someone is wiling to mentor for the task.

This sounds good. FWIW, I fully agree that an incremental approach would
work best, where experienced developers would do some upfront design to
carve out tasks that would advance buildbot in the right direction, then
let students work on those tasks.

In particular, I think you have already enlisted a few such tasks (which
may actually require sub-division, to map to bite-sized tasks that fit
into the GSoC):

>  * slaves pulling work rather than the master pushing it
>  * dynamic addition of slaves
>  * cryptographic authentication (as Andrii suggests)
>  * slave configuration checks

In particular, I think the first and the last of these are pretty
independent and self-contained, so might be good candidates. The other
two (dynamic slave addition and authentication) are closely related and
may be easier to add once the two other are already implemented.

I'll think some more about the pull model, and try to come up with some
design / GSoC task description. What's the best place to discuss that ?
This list ?

> Again, this is a great idea, and I hope it proceeds.  I'm only
> outlining what I see as the most likely conditions for success.

Understood.

Thanks,
        Stefan

-- 

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





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