[OPEN-ILS-DEV] Announcing the OpenILS Buildbot

[Dan Scott]

On Tue, 2009-11-24 at 17:51 -0500, Shawn Boyette wrote:
> It's alive! You can have a look-see at:
> 
>    http://testing.esilibrary.com/
> 
> The web bits are pretty self-explanatory. From the front page, either 
> click on the "Last build" of a project to examine the full output 
> generated by that build, or click on "History" to see an overview of all 
> stored builds for a project. (And from there you can drill down to the 
> individual build of your choice.)

Neat! It would make sense for someone to build a simple Web page using
yesterday's Web standards so that any browser can read the data. Should
be pretty straightforward to at least display the last build results,
and hopefully we could host that page at evergreen-ils.org

<snip>

> 
> EMAIL NOTIFICATION
> ---------------------------
> The back-end of the buildbot can send you email anytime a build for a 
> specific project succeeds or fails (or both). There is no way to sign 
> yourself up for this right now, so just let me know if you'd like to get 
> mail from the bot, which project you want it for, and whether you want 
> to know about successes or fails.

Rather than manually signing people up, how about sending build results
to a mailing list? Possibly a new list, if people are afraid of too much
noise in open-ils-dev - although that will also ensure that any build
failures are quickly evident.

> IRC NOTIFICATION
> ---------------------------
> Still planned, but will be on a back burner.
> 
> NIGHTLY TARBALLS
> ---------------------------
> Should be happening this week. Early ones might be not-quite-right; 
> feedback will be appreciated. Strictly speaking, these won't be 
> "nightly", they'll be "generated every night from the last successful 
> build",

Awesome! It will be fabulous to get away from the day-plus packaging
slog (although we still need to work out labour-saving approaches for
release notes and the like).

I'm guessing there's not much chance that the Evergreen staff client
packaging for Windows will be automated as part of this effort?

> BUILDBOT SOURCE
> ---------------------------
> There is some light cleanup to be done, and then if anybody wants it, 
> they can have it.
> 
> There's nothing in this system which is particular -- or in fact, knows 
> anything about -- Evergreen. It's a complete generic, if perhaps 
> simplistic, continuous integration system.
> 
> The forthcoming docs will go into its design in some detail.

Great. Consider this a request to make the source tree publicly
available!

> FUTURE PLANS
> ---------------------------
> This is likely the only "push" the buildbot will ever get, but I do have 
> plans to refine and update it beyond its capabilities at this moment.
> 
> The database layer is abstracted, but at the moment has only one backend 
> (MongoDB). I plan to write a SQLite driver for it as well.

MongoDB - that's an interesting choice. Might be nice to set up
replication to another instance, say, on evergreen-ils.org.

> The VC layer is *not* abstracted, and should be. Once it is, at I'd like 
> to write a git module to accompany the existing SVN one.
> 
> Related to that, I'd really like to capture commit messages, but that 
> looks like a mildly hairy problem and I let it go for the time being.
> 
> I'd really like to make it be smarter about tests and have some 
> integration/processing of test output instead of just capturing that output.
> 
> Ideas (and, eventually, patches) welcome.
> 

Thanks very much, Shawn! This is a huge step (or a whole bunch of steps)
in the right direction for the project!