As I wrote last week, I’ve been attending to Guadec 2006 in Vilanova i la Geltru. A very positive experience, with lots of meetings, talks and interesting events in general.
For last thursday, there was a BOF about Continuous Integration hosted by Juan José Sánchez. There, I presented the work with Tinderbox here in Igalia, and we discussed a bit about the requirements for a Continuos Integration service in Gnome project. The interest was more than I expected, and we shared our experiences and decided to create a work group to get the infrastructure up. It’s called Gnome Build Brigade, and we’ve set up a wiki (yes, all belongs to wiki!)
Currently we have the fantastic work from Frederic Peters (JHAutobuild). It’s running last months, and offers RSS information about compilation status for developers.
But Thomas Vander Stichele proposed Buildbot, as they’re using it in Fluendo for gstreamer. Main reasons: well maintained, big community and more mature. So it seems the way to go, and I began to test it yesterday, as I’m planning to move Fisterra continuous integration to Buildbot.
Yes, buildbot is very easy. It’s more strict about clients (slaves in its notation), but it lets server administrator get a better control over them. And the model is more secure. I’ve also been learning a bit about Twisted, the framework it uses to implement an asynchronous events system. I also implemented a prototype of integration with jhbuild that is working for small sets of modules, but does not handle dependencies yet.
My compromise with Build brigade group is about jhbuild work anyway. I’ll be these days working on JHBuild integration, to extend it to fit better with CI systems (I’ve prepared a patch for stages splitting, and I would want to add more options to checkout). I’ll write about these next days.