[users at bb.net] Buildbot worker in Jenkins

[Denis Ovsienko]

Hello list.

I've been tinkering with Buildbot for a couple months, and so far
managed to get the workers running on a number of architectures and
Unix-like operating systems. It's been an interesting journey so far.

There is one specific architecture though, which I can access through
Jenkins only at the time. The Jenkins instance runs the build via
Docker, so I've been thinking if it would be possible to run
buildbot-worker in the container. The reason for this is that the
master configuration is done programmatically as a product of several
repositories and several workers, and in Jenkins it takes to create a
separate build for every repository, and to update the builder specifics
manually. Also it would be more convenient to manage the status reports
in one place.

The Buildbot manual describes Docker latent workers, which assumes that
the master requests a container from the docker server. However, in this
case this is not possible.

That said, the existing "buildbot/buildbot-worker" Docker container
boils down to running "buildbot-worker start --nodaemon", so Jenkins
could run that instead of the build commands. This way the Buildbot
master could have a regular (non-latent) worker permanently configured,
and Jenkins could start the container with buildbot-worker on a web hook
from the git hosting service.

The matter is, the worker container needs to exit after consuming all
its build request queue. One way to achieve that could be through the
master's "build_wait_timeout", which would possibly require either a
new (mostly no-op) latent worker class, or porting the parameter into
the non-latent worker space. Another way could be through an additional
optional worker parameter, such as "buildbot-worker start --nodaemon
--idle-timeout 60", so as soon as the worker has no new work for a
minute, it exits and the Jenkins build concludes.

Do you think this would be a useful addition? If somebody implements
anything along these lines, I would be glad to test the new feature.

-- 
    Denis Ovsienko