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

Sun Jan 12 19:27:14 UTC 2014

Making the easy things easy isn't chasing simplicity, IMHO.

On Sun, Jan 12, 2014 at 11:16 AM, shiny knight <theshinyknight at me.com> wrote:
>
> 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
>>
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> CenturyLink Cloud: The Leader in Enterprise Cloud Services.
>> Learn Why More Businesses Are Choosing CenturyLink Cloud For
>> Critical Workloads, Development Environments & Everything In Between.
>> Get a Quote or Start a Free Trial Today.
>>
>> http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=119420431&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk
>> _______________________________________________
>> Buildbot-devel mailing list
>> Buildbot-devel at lists.sourceforge.net
>> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/buildbot-devel
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> CenturyLink Cloud: The Leader in Enterprise Cloud Services.
> Learn Why More Businesses Are Choosing CenturyLink Cloud For
> Critical Workloads, Development Environments & Everything In Between.
> Get a Quote or Start a Free Trial Today.
> http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=119420431&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk_______________________________________________
> Buildbot-devel mailing list
> Buildbot-devel at lists.sourceforge.net
> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/buildbot-devel
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> CenturyLink Cloud: The Leader in Enterprise Cloud Services.
> Learn Why More Businesses Are Choosing CenturyLink Cloud For
> Critical Workloads, Development Environments & Everything In Between.
> Get a Quote or Start a Free Trial Today.
> http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=119420431&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk
> _______________________________________________
> Buildbot-devel mailing list
> Buildbot-devel at lists.sourceforge.net
> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/buildbot-devel
>