[Buildbot-devel] Mozilla moving away from buildbot?

[Dustin J. Mitchell]

I can fill in a little background here.  Mozilla's been using the same
version of Buildbot - 0.8.2, for something like four years now.  So,
in a way, Mozilla hasn't been using Buildbot for several years now.

Work to move away from or beyond Buildbot is really just an effort to
modernize.  We're faced with the choice of contributing to a project
which serves a large pool of users, adding features in a way that they
can be accepted upstream, or starting fresh and building a tool that
solves exactly the problem you have and no more.  Framed that way, the
choice to try to implement a custom CI system makes a lot of sense
(much as I wish it was otherwise).  The result will, of course, be
open source, but as always, there's a big gulf between "you can modify
and distribute the source" and "this might actually be useful to you".

It's important to note, too, that this is an experimental initiative
within Mozilla.  Sometimes things don't work out.  TaskCluster might
turn out to be impractical in the face of the crazy detailed
requirements release engineers are familiar with.  Time will tell.

Dustin