[Buildbot-devel] How would I go about this Buildbot 0.8.8 setup?

[Ian Lavery]

Hello Buildbotters,

I am fairly new to Buildbot and I have tasked to update and reconfigure my company's Buildbot setup, so I'm going to need some help from you more experienced Buildbot developers, or at least someone to point me in the right direction.

The Current Setup:

We currently have 10 Buildslaves running on VMs and one Buildmaster. They build our code on several different platforms and run tests, code scanners, doc gens, etc. They are all currently running Buildbot 0.8.3.

We're using Perforce for version control and currently have our one Buildmaster polling all our major branches for changes. This can cause a lot of unnecessary builds and leads to some pretty hacky filtering to even attempt to parse out what is being added and what should be built on our system. We now make a habit of work in Perforce streams (essentially a branch) for rough-draft development or potential code-breaking changes, which doesn't really gel with the current Buildbot setup. So as you can see we are in need of a new Buildbot setup.

The Planned 0.8.8 Setup:

So, the goal for us is to:

1)      Update the Slaves and Master to version 0.8.8

2)      Harness the features that have been added between 0.8.3 and the new Buildbot effectively for the new setup

3)      Have multiple Buildmasters that all make use of the same pool of Buildslaves, which will consist of:

-  one assigned to trigger automatic builds for our main stream every time something is submitted

-  one assigned to trigger automatic builds for our research/active development stream every time something is submitted

-  one (or more) where the user can trigger a custom build by selecting a Perforce stream they want to build and manually triggering the build

My Questions:

1)      What are some of the most useful features that have been added in the last few versions that I should know about or make use of with our new Buildbot setup?

2)      How would you go about creating multiple Buildmasters running on the same machine using the same pool of Buildslaves? Is this a pipe dream or a possibility?

3)      How would you go about setting up a Buildmaster that can switch between a list of active Perforce streams and trigger a series of builds on this stream? We just want a simple interface that allows the user to manually start a build by selecting a stream from a dropdown menu and maybe have some control over what builds.

As I said, I'm fairly new to Buildbot so be easy on me. Any help (especially in the form of code samples) would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,
- Ian
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