[Buildbot-devel] Competing with the coming wave of single-platform CI servers

[shiny knight]

I also believe that Buildbot should not go chasing the simplicity of other products.

I tried Jenkins, and honestly the simplicity made me wonder why did I used Buildbot in first place. Especially for the configuration done via UI, and the excellent waterfall page 
But then I started to face issues about how to do something that was not planned by the Jenkins folks, and noticed how complex it is to customize it to something other than a generic linear use.

So I went back to Buildbot, and I am glad I did (altho I really miss the nice and polished waterfall, I didn't learned yet how to configure the UI with Jenga, and really wish that other users would donate some templates, especially the ones blessed with the UI design eye).

Many ask me why not Jenkins or Travis, and mostly I think that it is because they have a different learn curve, where you are immediately operative. For some it is all that matters.

Diversity is good, but the common traits should be embraced; as today I think that many gets scared by Buildbot and move on something easier, just because the config requires steps beyond some simple one.

I just recently started with Buildbot, so my view is from the newbies; maybe veterans can see things that I don't.


On Jan 11, 2014, at 6:01 AM, Pierre Tardy <tardyp at gmail.com> wrote:

> Indeed, market share is not the main goal of buildbot. However marketshare is important in the visibility of the project, and the ability to recruit more contibutors.
> 
> If you got a project that suits well some market segment, then the project start getting more contributors, and is improving at a higher pace in a snowball effect.
> 
> For me Buildbot has an important market share for complex installation, where people want to have solid control on the process they want to implement. We got users from the most massive teams in the world, having several CI system serving 500+ developers projects.
> 
> I agree that securing this market is important for the buildbot project, and this is why we are working hard on the nine project.
> 
> The new nine UI is much more modular, and opens the way for people to develop UI for anything that you would think of including a  simple configuration editor.
> 
> On top of that there is a buildbot-travis project https://github.com/isotoma/buildbot_travis. which looks very interesting.
> 
> I agree with Dustin that its good to have easy to use solutions like travis. buildbot project is even using it. I dont think we have the ressource to actually try to compete in the mass market of jenkins, teamcity, quickbuild, which is already imho with too much players.
> 
> But we are certainly open for patches trying to improve the first 20 minutes of experience, and also encourage the building of higher level CI applications using buildbot as the engine (like buildbot_travis)
> 
> 
> 
> Pierre
> 
> 
> On Fri, Jan 10, 2014 at 3:42 PM, Dustin J. Mitchell <dustin at v.igoro.us> wrote:
> I'll explain my approach to this question until now, but it's probably
> no longer the best approach now that we're an SFC project.  The
> question is, mechanically within the project, how can we change?
> 
> Here's my approach:
> 
> As an open-source project, Buildbot doesn't necessarily need to chase
> "market share".  In fact, the world is a better place if Buildbot is
> good at *different* things than other CI tools, rather than trying to
> be as good at the things they're good at.  Since it doesn't hurt
> Buidlbot directly if someone chooses, say, XCode or Jenkins, we
> actually have the luxury of focusing on strengths, and on serving its
> current users.  Or to put it another way, for someone who just wants
> to run 'python setup.py test' on their python library, is it really
> ethical for us to suggest that they use Buidlbot and not Travis?
> 
> With limited development time and limited ability to "direct" anyone
> other than myself, I've focused my time on remedying some of the
> technical deficiencies that make Buildbot problematic in its areas of
> strength.  That boils down to the nine project, really, and as we've
> seen that's a *lot* of work.  If I were to redirect the resources
> under my control (which is to say, my free time) to making Buildbot
> more suitable for "something simple", I think that would entail
> building collaborations with other organizations - hosting and cloud
> services like Heroku, AWS, GCE; project services like GitHub,
> BitBucket, SourceForge; IDEs like Eclipse; and so on.  In the cloud
> era, this is how you build a nearly-single-click system -- not by
> requiring installation and configuration (in a text file!) of two
> daemons.  Buildbot could get there, with a lot of technical work and a
> lot of negotiation.  But "there" is basically "Travis Lite",
> "technical work" means work I'm not doing on nine, and "negotiation"
> is easier with SFC as our umbrella, but certainly not a skill I posess
> in abundance.
> 
> I'd love to hear thoughts from anyone, especially other Botherders.
> 
> Dustin
> 
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