[SAC] Resurrect continuous integration VM (once again)

[Mateusz Loskot]

On 20/09/11 13:33, Sandro Santilli wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 20, 2011 at 11:44:44AM +0100, Mateusz Loskot wrote:
>> I discussed this shortly with Howard and Chris in Denver and we
>> agreed to replace old-good Buildbot with http://jenkins-ci.org
>
> Ouch, for a moment I belived you changed your mind about moving to
> Java.

Let's say, I had been undecided :-)

> For those (like me) that didn't know: "jenkins-ci" is the new name
> for "hudson".

Yes.

> What are the pros/cons for droppin Buildbot again ?

The major one is that it requires maintainer to be familiar with
low-level Buildbot-Fu. I seem to be the only person here who
understands the configuration [1] and is able to maintain it
[1] http://svn.osgeo.org/osgeo/buildbot/
This is a disadvantage.
The Jenkins is more user and maintainer friendly, is easier to
configure, connect new slaves, etc.

When I was testing hudson, I didn't like several things, that's why I
couldn't make final decision. Here we go on Hudson (versus my Buildbot
experience):
- documentation was really bad, based on Wiki mess
- (So,) I could not find any "best practice" setup to figure out how to
configure it best for OSGeo
- (So,) I had impression it's very to make setup mess (easy access &
trivial operations leading to countless slaves and jobs leading to
multi-dimensional configuration extreme)

Buildbot has fantastic documentation, indeed.

Long story short, both Buildbot and Jenkins are very powerful and
customisable machines. But, from maintainer point of view - trying to
find analogy in world of data processing - the former is like manually
maintaining large and complex GDAL VRT files, the latter is like click &
drag in GUI of Safe FME software.

> What does it take to donate build slaves ?

Are you asking about this?

https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Distributed+builds

> Btw, taking a look at the packages list available on my systems
> (from debian lenny to ubuntu 10.04) to check availability status of
> jenkings/hudson/buildbot packages, I've stumbled upon
> http://bitten.edgewall.org/ which naturally integrates into trac.
> Does anyone have experience with it ? ("buildbot" and "bitten" were
> the only available packages, for the record).

Trac is a really great idea, but very badly implemented.
I'd like keep my own hands off the Trac.

Best regards,
-- 
Mateusz Loskot, http://mateusz.loskot.net
Charter Member of OSGeo, http://osgeo.org
Member of ACCU, http://accu.org