Sergey Petrunya writes:

Grid display (http://askmonty.org/buildbot/grid) is very nice, but it would be even nicer if one could display only pushes into one particular branch, like in pushbuild. Is it difficult to achieve? If not, can I request it from somebody or will need to spend the effort myself?

Buildbot seems to accept a `branch` URL parameter for grid just like the waterfall: http://askmonty.org/buildbot/grid?branch=5.1 (didn't know this, but tried it and it worked ;-)

Can we have buildbot automatically re-build things, say, daily when no other load is present? I've re-ran maria-5.1 tests on my machine several times and it failed all three times with different number of failing tests, which is an indication of precence of random failures. (In Sun/MySQL I used to push fixes that touch only comments in order to trigger re-builds and catch random failures)

In Buildbot, there is a button on the webpage to request a new build, one can specify both branch and revision to build. Eg. http://askmonty.org/buildbot/builders/hardy-amd64-dbg/

Can we have buildbot also process other branches? maria trees are public- facing trees, so I suppose that means we should not break them too often, and one way to do that is to have staging trees where features could be tested before they are pushed into the main tree.

It is easy to add more branches. One problem right now is that we do not really have much in the way of build host resources. Just a couple of machines kindly donated by community, some of them also doing other work. And the Valgrind host is currently my desktop machine. So we do not currently have unlimited build capacity, but we can probably get more as community steps up or we buy machines ourselves to satisfy any future needs.

One could argue that this could be achieved by autopush, but autopush only uses one platform, doesn't save/keep track of test run results, etc. My experience at Sun/MySQL shows that pushbuild (and I suppose buildbot) over a separate branch is much better. It runs different tests on different platforms, pedantically records test results (where everyone can see them), etc etc.

I did discuss with Monty several times the idea to have some kind of autopush functionality in the Buildbot, so one could push to a staging tree, and if compile and test passes on all hosts, it will be pushed to main trees automatically. But it is not something I have started working on at the moment. Also, Don Kehn, whom I know from when we were colleagues, has mentined that he would like to do some work on Buildbot.

Is it possible to set up buildbot to run several configurations, but one after the other? Looking at the buildbot status page, I see that - there are not too many hosts - they are idle most of the time. Suppose I want to use my 32/64 box to build 32 and 64 bit, debug and release, using gcc and sunstudio. That's 2^3 = 8 combinations, but I don't want to have 8 build bots running in parallel (I dont think the box has enough RAM for that)?

Yes, this is fully supported in Buildbot configuration.

p.s. I myself have almost repaired my desktop computer, so we can expect to have a dual 32/64-bit buildbot slave to be added as soon as I finish setting things up (sometime this week).

Sounds great! - Kristian.