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

[Stefan Seefeld]

On 01/11/2013 11:16 AM, Marc-Antoine Ruel wrote:
> The main issue with buildbot steems from any configuration change
> requires a "kill -HUP `cat twistd.pid`" and it's tricky to get it
> working on complex configurations.

Can you elaborate a bit ? I'm not sure how that relates to the use-case
I'm describing. Are you thinking of the master having to be reconfigured
each time a new slave wants to connect ? I think that would be one
aspect that would have to change, obviously. New slaves would need to be
configurable at (master) runtime.
Note that this isn't quite the same kind of reconfiguration as adding
entirely new builders, or changing schedulers. As long as the new slave
belongs into a known category (i.e., would pick up an existing builder,
and connect to an existing scheduler), I think that's entirely reasonable.

>
> The new buildbot idiomatic way of doing it is to stop the schedulers
> on the master and start a second master to take on with the new
> configuration but we can't do this yet. So configuration changes,
> including adding a new slave, are still quite disruptive.

OK.

>
> You can't have a slave to connect without prior knowledge from the
> master. So I don't know if it is efficiently possible.

Yeah, understood. There is definitely a new protocol to be worked out
that supports "untrusted" slaves, or which establishes trust differently.

>
> We're heading a different way in the chromium project. I'll send the
> details off-list because after re-reading myself it read like an
> advertisement and it may not be appropriate to this list. I'll just
> note the source codes here since they are all 3 open source after all;
> https://code.google.com/p/go/source/browse/#hg%2Fmisc%2Fdashboard (for
> the golang dashboard)
> http://trac.webkit.org/browser/trunk/Tools/Scripts/webkitpy (for the
> EWS webkit bots)
> https://code.google.com/p/swarming/source/browse/#svn%2Ftrunk%2Fsrc
> (for Swarm)

OK, thanks.

FWIW, I was looking around for available CI services for Free Software
projects, and ran into Travis CI. While I like the idea of such a
service (especially if it's Free !), I don't think it scales well.

Regards,

        Stefan

-- 

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