[Buildbot-devel] Strategy for highly branched codebase

[Ludovic Chabant]

Hey everyone,

So this may be as much of a buildbot setup question as it is a project
setup question. Our codebase is shared across several different projects,
each of which has any number of branches and variants. There is a crazy
total number of branches.

Now we don't have all those branches on our build server, but we need to
add/remove any branch at any moment to/from the build server. Basically
when we need to work with some of our clients, we would add some of their
branches to the build server to monitor the changes we make there, and also
have the build server do stuff for us like populate our Perforce proxies
(customers are all around the world) or warm up our data caches (there is
data building involved, not just code).

Now the problem lies with the various scripts that our builders execute.
They're in source control, but different projects and different branches
have different versions of those scripts -- and sometime they don't have
them yet because that team is still on an older version of the codebase.

So far, I can think of only 2 solutions:

1. Write custom build steps with all the logic in them.
I know this is frowned upon, but this may be an edge case. The problem is
that there isn't a lot of information about doing this kind of thing, so I
don't know what can be done, what can't be done, etc. Does anybody have
experience with this?

2. Put all the build stuff in a separate codebase.
Basically put all the scripts in a standalone repository, and have the
buildslaves not only sync the normal codebase, but also sync the "scripts"
codebase, so any changes to them would apply to any project, regardless of
what version of our codebase they have.
This could be a problem however since, at least with Perforce, each builder
is supposed to have only one workspace, located inside the "build"
directory. That workspace could only include the build scripts (through
some custom viewspec) if they're on the same Perforce server as the normal
codebase, which is not necessarily the case.
Has anybody tried something like that?

Is there maybe a 3rd option I haven't thought about?
--
   l u d o .
   . 8 0 17 80
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