1 User visible changes in Buildbot. -*- outline -*-
3 * Release 0.7.7 (29 Mar 2008)
5 ** Things You Need To Know
7 *** builder names must not start with an underscore (`_').
9 These are now reserved for internal buildbot purposes, such as the magic
10 "_all" pseudo-builder that the web pages use to allow force-build buttons
11 that start builds on all Builders at once.
15 *** "buildbot checkconfig"
17 The "buildbot checkconfig" command will look at your master.cfg file and tell
18 you if there are any problems with it. This can be used to test potential
19 changes to your config file before submitting them to the running
20 buildmaster. This is particularly useful to run just before doing "buildbot
21 restart", since the restart will fail if the config file has an error. By
22 running "buildbot checkconfig master.cfg && buildbot restart", you'll only
23 perform the restart if the config file was ok. Many thanks to Ben Hearsum for
26 *** Waterfall "?category=FOO" query-arguments
28 The Waterfall page now accepts one or more "category=" query arguments in the
29 URL, to filter the display by categories. These behave a lot like the
30 "builder=" query argument. Thanks to Jermo Davann for the patch.
34 Many bugs were fixed, and many minor features were added. Many thanks to
35 Dustin Mitchell who fixed and coordinated many of these. Here is a terse
36 list, for more details, please see the Trac page for the 0.7.7 release, at
37 http://buildbot.net/trac/query?status=closed&milestone=0.7.7 :
39 Many of the URLs generated by the buildbot were wrong.
40 Display of last-heard-from timestamps on the buildslaves web page were wrong.
41 Asking an IRC bot about a build waiting on a Lock should no longer crash.
42 Same for the web viewer.
43 Stop treating the encouraged info/ directory as leftover.
44 Add more force/stop build buttons.
45 Timestamps displayed on the waterfall now handle daylight savings properly.
46 p4poller no longer quits after a single failure.
47 Improved Git support, including 'try', branch, and revisions.
48 Buildslaves now use 'git', not 'cogito'.
49 Make older hg client/servers handle specific-revision builds properly.
50 Fix twisted.scripts._twistw problem on twisted-2.5.0 and windows.
51 Fix workdir= and env= on ShellCommands
52 Fix logfile-watching in 'buildbot start' on OS-X.
53 Fix ShellCommand crashes when the program emits >640kB of output per chunk.
54 New WarningCountingShellCommand step.
56 Fix transfer.FileUpload/FileDownload crashes for large files.
57 Make 'buildbor reconfig' on windows tell you that it doesn't work.
58 Add a To: header to the mail sent by the slave-missing timeout.
59 Disable usePTY= for most unit tests, it makes some debian systems flunk tests.
60 Add 'absolute source stamps'
61 Add 'triggerable schedulers', and a buildstep to trigger them.
62 Remove buildbot.changes.freshcvsmail
63 Add new XMLRPC methods: getAllBuilders, getStatus, getLastBuilds.
64 Accept WithProperties in more places: env=, workdir=, others.
65 Use --no-auth-cache with SVN commands to avoid clobbering shared svn state.
66 Add hours/minutes/seconds in the waterfall's ETA display.
67 Trial: count Doctest lines too.
68 ShellCommand: record more info in the headers: stdin closing, PTY usage.
69 Make it possible to stop builds across reconfig boundaries.
70 SVN revision numbers are now passed as strings, which was breaking MailNotifier
72 ** Deprecation Schedule
74 The changes.freshcvsmail change source was replaced by
75 changes.mail.FCMaildirSource in 0.7.6, and has been removed in 0.7.7 .
77 c['sources'] (plural) was replaced by c['change_source'] (singular) in 0.7.6,
78 and will be removed by 0.8.0.
80 c['bots'] was replaced by c['buildslaves'] in 0.7.6, and will be removed by
81 0.8.0 . c['bots'] only accepts BuildSlave instances, not name/passwd tuples.
83 The html.Waterfall status target was replaced by html.WebStatus in 0.7.6, and
84 will be removed by 0.8.0.
87 * Release 0.7.6 (30 Sep 2007)
89 ** Things You Need To Know
91 *** 'buildbot upgrade-master'
93 Each time you install a new version of Buildbot, you should run the new
94 'buildbot upgrade-master' command on each of your pre-existing buildmasters.
95 This will add files and fix (or at least detect) incompatibilities between
96 your old config and the new code.
98 *** new WebStatus page
100 The Waterfall has been replaced by the more general WebStatus display,
101 described below. WebStatus serves static files from a new public_html/
102 directory that lives in the buildmaster's basedir. Files like index.html,
103 buildbot.css, and robots.txt are served directly from that directory, so any
104 modifications you wish to make should be made to those files. In particular,
105 any custom CSS you've written should be copied into public_html/buildbot.css.
106 The 'upgrade-master' command will populate this directory for you.
108 The old Waterfall page is deprecated, but it should continue to work for
109 another few releases. It is now a subclass of WebStatus which just replaces
110 the default root URL with another copy of the /waterfall resource.
112 *** Compatibility: Python-2.3 or newer, Twisted-2.0 or newer
114 No compatiblity losses here, buildbot-0.7.6 is compatible with the same
115 versions of python and twisted that 0.7.5 was.
117 Buildbot is tested on a regular basis (http://buildbot.buildbot.net) against
118 nearly a full matrix of Python-(2.3,2.4,2.5) * Twisted-(2.0,2.1,2.2,2.4,2.5).
120 *** New Buildbot Home Page
122 Buildbot has moved to a new Trac instance at http://buildbot.net/ , and all
123 new bugs and tickets should be filed there. The old sourceforge bugs at
124 http://buildbot.sf.net/ will slowly be migrated over. Mailing lists are still
125 managed at sourceforge, and downloads are still available there.
127 *** Changed/Deprecated master.cfg Keys and Classes
129 c['sources'] (plural) has been replaced by c['change_source'] (singular).
131 c['bots'] has been replaced by c['buildslaves'], and it expects a list of
132 BuildSlave instances instead of tuples. See below for more details.
134 The 'freshcvsmail' change source has been deprecated, and will be removed in
137 The html.Waterfall status target has been deprecated, and replaced by
144 The new WebStatus display is a superset of the old Waterfall. It contains a
145 waterfall as a sub-page, but it also contains pages with more compact
146 representations of recent build status. The "one_line_per_build" page
147 contains just that, and "one_box_per_builder" shows just the information from
148 the top of the waterfall page (last-finished-build and current-activity).
150 The initial page (when you hit the root of the web site) is served from
151 index.html, and provides links to the Waterfall as well as the other pages.
153 Most of these pages can be filtered by adding query arguments to the URL.
154 Adding "?builder=XYZ" will cause the page to only show results for the given
155 builder. Adding "?builder=XYZ&builder=ABC" will show results for either
156 builder. "?branch=trunk" will limit the results to builds that involved code
159 The /waterfall page has arguments to hide those annoying "buildslave
160 connected" messages, to start and and at arbitrary times, and to auto-refresh
161 at a chosen interval (with a hardcoded minimum of 15 seconds). It also has a
162 "help" page with forms that will help you add all of these nifty filtering
165 The recommended practice is to modify the index.html file to include links to
166 the filtered pages that you find most useful.
168 Note that WebStatus defaults to allowForce=False, meaning that the display
169 will not offer or accept "Force Build" or "Stop Build" controls. (The old
170 Waterfall defaults to allowForce=True).
172 The new WebStatus pages try very hard to use only relative links, making life
173 better when the Buildbot sits behind an HTTP reverse proxy.
175 In addition, there is a rudimentary XMLRPC server run by the WebStatus
176 object. It only has two methods so far, but it will acquire more in the
177 future. The first customer of this is a project to add a buildbot plugin to
180 *** BuildFactory.addStep(Step(args))
182 BuildFactories can be set up either with a complete list of steps, or by
183 calling the .addStep() method repeatedly. The preferred way to provide a step
184 is by instantiating it, rather than giving a class/kwargs pair. This gives
185 the BuildStep class a chance to examine the arguments (and complain about
186 anything it doesn't like) while the config file is being read and problems
187 are being logged. For example, the old-style:
189 from buildbot.process.factory import BuildFactory, s
190 steps = [s(CVS, cvsroot="blah", mode="copy"),
191 s(Compile, command=["make", "all"]),
192 s(Test, command=["make", "test"]),
194 f = BuildFactory(steps)
199 f.addStep( CVS(cvsroot="blah", mode="copy") )
200 f.addStep( Compile(command=["make", "all"]) )
201 f.addStep( Test(command=["make", "test"]) )
203 Authors of BuildStep subclasses which override __init__ to add new arguments
204 must register them with self.addFactoryArguments(**newargs) to make sure that
205 those classes will work with this new style, otherwise the new arguments will
208 Using class/kwargs pairs is deprecated, and will be removed in a future
212 *** BuildSlave instances, max_builds=, notify_on_missing=
214 Buildslave specification has changed a lot in this release. The old config:
216 c['bots'] = [ ("bot1name", "bot1passwd"),
217 ("bot2name", "bot2passwd") ]
221 from buildbot.buildslave import BuildSlave
222 c['slaves'] = [ BuildSlave("bot1name", "bot1passwd"),
223 BuildSlave("bot2name", "bot2passwd") ]
225 This new form gives us the ability to add new controls. The first is
226 "max_builds=", which imposes a concurrency limit that is like the usual
227 SlaveLock, but gives the buildmaster the opportunity to find a different
228 slave to run the build. (the buildslave is chosen before the SlaveLock is
229 claimed, so pure SlaveLocks don't let you take full advantage of build
232 The other addition is "notify_on_missing=", which accepts an email address
233 (or list of addresses), and sends a message when the buildslave has been
234 disconnected for more than an hour (configurable with missing_timeout=). This
235 may be useful when you expect that the buildslave hosts should be available
236 most of the time, and want to investigate the reasons that it went offline.
239 ** Other Improvements
241 The IRC bot has been refactored to make it easier to add instant-messaging
242 status delivery in the future. The IM plugins are not yet written, though.
244 When multiple buildslaves are available for a given build, one of them will
245 be picked at random. In previous releases, the first one on the list was
246 always picked. This helps to add a certain measure of load-balancing. More
247 improvements will be made in the future.
249 When the buildslave does a VC checkout step that requires clobbering the
250 build directory (i.e. in all modes except for 'update'), the buildslave will
251 first set the permissions on all build files to allow their deletion, before
252 it attempts to delete them. This should fix some problems in which a build
253 process left non-user-writable files lying around (frequently a result of
254 enthusiastic unit tests).
256 The BuildStep's workdir= argument can now accept a WithProperties()
257 specification, allowing greater control over the workdir.
259 Support for the 'Bazaar' version control system (/usr/bin/bzr) has been
260 added, using the buildbot.steps.source.Bzr class. This is a replacement for
261 the old 'Arch' (/usr/bin/tla and /usr/bin/baz) systems, which are still
262 supported by Buildbot with the source.Arch and source.Bazaar classes,
263 respectively. Unfortunately the old baz system claimed the 'Bazaar' classname
264 early, so the new system must use source.Bzr instead of the desired
265 source.Bazaar . A future release might change this.
267 A rudimentary Gnome Panel applet is provided in contrib/bb_applet.py, which
268 provides 'buildbot statusgui' -like colored status boxes inside the panel.
269 Installing it is a bit tricky, though.
271 The 'buildbot try' command now accepts a '--diff=foo.patch' argument, to let
272 you provide a pre-computed patch. This makes it easier to test out patches
273 that you've looked over for safety, without first applying them to your local
276 A new Mercurial change source was added, hg_buildbot.py, which runs as an
277 in-process post-commit hook. This gives us access to much more information
278 about the change, as well as being much faster.
280 The email-based changesource have been refactored, to make it easier to write
281 new mail parsers. A parser for the SVN "commit-email.pl" script has been
286 Far too many to count. Please see
287 http://buildbot.net/trac/query?status=closed&milestone=0.7.6 for a partial
288 list of tickets closed for this release, and the ChangeLog for a complete
289 list of all changes since 0.7.5 .
292 * Release 0.7.5 (10 Dec 2006)
294 ** Things You Need To Know
296 *** The Great BuildStep Renaming
298 All BuildSteps have moved! They used to be classes in buildbot.process.step,
299 but now they all have separate modules in buildbot.steps.* . They have been
300 split out into separate categories: for example, the source checkout steps
301 are now buildbot.steps.source.CVS, buildbot.steps.source.Darcs, etc. The most
302 commonly used one is probably buildbot.steps.shell.ShellCommand . The
303 python-specific steps are in buildbot.steps.python, and the Twisted-specific
304 steps are in buildbot.steps.python_twisted .
306 You will need to update your master.cfg files to use the new names. The old
307 names are deprecated and will be removed altogether in the next release.
311 Buildbot now requires python-2.3 or later. Buildbot now requires
312 Twisted-2.0.0 or later. Support for earlier versions of both has finally been
313 removed. If you discover it works with unsupported versions, please return
314 your Buildbot to the factory for repairs :-).
316 Buildbot has *not* yet been tested against the recent python-2.5 release. It
317 has been tested against the latest SVN version of Twisted, but only in
318 conjunction with python-2.4 .
322 *** reconfiguring a Builder no longer causes a disconnect/reconnect cycle
324 This means that sending SIGHUP to the master or running 'buildbot reconfig
325 MASTERDIR' command no longer interrupts any current builds, nor does it lose
326 pending builds like it did before. This involved a fairly substantial
327 refactoring of the various internal BotPerspective/BotMaster/Builder classes.
328 Note that reconfiguring Schedulers still loses any Changes that were waiting
329 for the tree to become stable: hopefully this will be fixed in the next
332 *** 'buildbot start/restart/reconfig' now show logs until startup is complete
334 These commands now have additional code to follow twistd.log and display all
335 the lines that are emitted from the beginning of the start/reconfig action
336 until it has completed. This gives you a chance to see any problems detected
337 in the config file without needing to manually look in twistd.log or use
338 another shell to 'tail -f' it. This also makes it clear which config file is
339 being used. This functionality is not available under windows.
341 In addition, if any problems are detected during 'start' or 'restart' (but
342 not reconfig), the buildbot command will terminate with a non-zero exit
343 status, making it easier to use in scripts. Closes SF#1517975.
345 *** Locks now take maxCount=N to allow multiple simultaneous owners
347 This allows Locks to be non-exclusive but still limit maximum concurrency.
348 Thanks to James Knight for the patch. Closes SF#1434997.
350 *** filetransfer steps
352 buildbot.steps.transfer.FileUpload is a buildstep that will move files from
353 the slave to the master. Likewise, FileDownload will move files from the
354 master down to the buildslave. Many thanks to Albert Hofkamp for contributing
355 these classes. Closes SF#1504631.
359 buildbot.steps.python.PyFlakes will run the simple 'pyflakes' static analysis
360 tool and parse the results to tell you about undefined names, unused imports,
361 etc. You'll need to tell it how to run pyflakes, usually with something like
362 command=["pyflakes", "src/packagedir"] or the like. The default command is
363 "make pyflakes", which assumes that you have a suitable target in your
368 Nathaniel Smith has contributed initial support for the Monotone version
369 control system. The code still needs docs and tests, but on the other hand it
370 has been in use by the Monotone buildbot for a long time now, so it is
371 probably fairly stable.
373 *** Tinderbox support
375 Ben Hearsum and the Mozilla crew have contributed some classes to allow
376 Buildbot to work with Tinderbox clients. One piece is
377 buildbot.changes.bonsaipoller.BonsaiPoller, which is a ChangeSource that
378 polls a Bonsai server (which is a kind of web-vased viewcvs CGI script) to
379 discover source code changes. The other piece is
380 buildbot.status.tinderbox.TinderboxMailNotifier, which is a status plugin
381 that sends email in the same format as Tinderbox does, which allows a number
382 of Tinderbox tools to be driven by Buildbot instead.
386 Niklaus Giger contributed a ChangeSource (buildbot.changes.svnpoller) which
387 polls a remote SVN repository on a periodic basis. This is useful when, for
388 whatever reason, you cannot add a post-commit hook script to the repository.
389 This obsoletes the external contrib/svn_watcher.py script.
391 ** notes for plugin developers
393 *** IStatusLog.readlines()
395 This new method makes it easier for a status plugin (or a
396 BuildStep.createSummary method) to walk through a StatusLog one line at a
397 time. For example, if you wanted to create an extra logfile that just
398 contained all the GCC warnings from the main log, you could use the
401 def createSummary(self, log):
403 for line in log.readlines():
404 if "warning:" in line:
406 self.addCompleteLog('warnings', "".join(warnings))
408 The "BuildStep LogFiles" section of the user's manual contains more
409 information. This method is not particularly memory-efficient yet (it reads
410 the whole logfile into memory first, then splits it into lines); this will be
411 improved in a future release.
415 *** Update source.SVN to work with the new SVN-1.4.0
417 The latest subversion changed the behavior in an unusual situation which
418 caused the unit tests to fail. This was unlikely to cause a problem in actual
419 usage, but the tests have been updated to pass with the new version.
421 *** update svn_buildbot.py to avoid mangling filenames
423 Older versions of this script were stripping the wrong number of columns from
424 the output of 'svnlook changed', and would sometimes mangle filenames. This
425 has been fixed. Closes SF#1545146.
427 *** logfiles= caused subsequent build failures under Windows
429 Earlier versions of buildbot didn't explicitly close any logfiles= file
430 handles when the build finished. On windows (where you cannot delete a file
431 that someone else is reading), this could cause the next build to fail as the
432 source checkout step was unable to delete the old working directory. This has
433 been fixed. Closes SF#1568415.
435 *** logfiles= didn't work on OS-X
437 Macintosh OS-X has a different behavior when reading files that have reached
438 EOF, the result was that logfiles= sometimes didn't work. Thanks to Mark Rowe
443 The 'buildbot sighup MASTERDIR' command has been replaced with 'buildbot
444 reconfig MASTERDIR', since that seems to be a slightly more meaningful name.
445 The 'sighup' form will remain as an alias.
448 * Release 0.7.4 (23 Aug 2006)
450 ** Things You Need To Know
452 The PBChangeSource's prefix= argument has changed, you probably need to add a
453 slash now. This is mostly used by sites which use Subversion and
456 The subcommands that are used to create a buildmaster or a buildslave have
457 changed. They used to be called 'buildbot master' and 'buildbot slave'. Now
458 they are called 'buildbot create-master' and 'buildbot create-slave'. Zipf's
459 Law suggests that these are more appropriate names for these
460 infrequently-used commands.
462 The syntax for the c['manhole'] feature has changed.
466 *** full Perforce support
468 SF#1473939: large patch from Scott Lamb, with docs and unit tests! This
469 includes both the step.P4 source-checkout BuildStep, and the changes.p4poller
470 ChangeSource you'll want to feed it. P4 is now supported just as well as all
471 the other VC systems. Thanks Scott!
473 *** SSH-based Manhole
475 The 'manhole' feature allows buildbot developers to get access to a python
476 read/eval/print loop (REPL) inside the buildmaster through a network
477 connection. Previously, this ran over unencrypted telnet, using a simple
478 username/password for access control. The new release defaults to encrypted
479 SSH access, using either username/password or an authorized_keys file (just
480 like sshd). There also exists an unencrypted telnet form, but its use is
481 discouraged. The syntax for setting up a manhole has changed, so master.cfg
482 files that use them must be updated. The "Debug options" section in the
483 user's manual provides a complete description.
485 *** Multiple Logfiles
487 BuildSteps can watch multiple log files in realtime, not just stdout/stderr.
488 This works in a similar fashion to 'tail -f': the file is polled once per
489 second, and any new data is sent to the buildmaster.
491 This requires a buildslave running 0.7.4 or later, and a warning message is
492 produced if used against an old buildslave (which will otherwise produce no
493 data). Use "logfiles={'name': 'filename'}" to take advantage of this feature
494 from master.cfg, and see the "ShellCommand" section of the user's manual for
497 The 'Trial' buildstep has been updated to use this, to display
498 _trial_temp/test.log in realtime. It also knows to fall back to the previous
499 "cat" command if the buildslave is too old.
503 BuildSteps can now add arbitrary URLs which will be displayed on the
504 Waterfall page in the same place that Logs are presented. This is intended to
505 provide a link to generated HTML pages, such as the output of a code coverage
506 tool. The step is responsible for somehow uploading the HTML to a web server:
507 this feature merely provides an easy way to present the HREF link to the
508 user. See the "BuildStep URLs" section of the user's manual for details and
513 BuildSteps can now attach LogObservers to various logfiles, allowing them to
514 get real-time log output. They can use this to watch for progress-indicating
515 events (like counting the number of files compiled, or the number of tests
516 which have run), and update both ETA/progress-tracking and step text. This
517 allows for more accurate ETA information, and more information passed to the
518 user about how much of the process has completed.
520 The 'Trial' buildstep has been updated to use this for progress tracking, by
521 counting how many test cases have run.
525 What classes are useful in your master.cfg file? A table of them has been
526 added to the user's manual, in a section called "Index of Useful Classes".
528 Want a list of all the keys in master.cfg? Look in the "Index of master.cfg
531 A number of pretty diagrams have been added to the "System Architecture"
532 portion of the manual, explaining how all the buildbot pieces fit together.
534 An HTML form of the user's manual is now shipped in the source tarball. This
535 makes it a bit bigger: sorry about that. The old PyCon-2003 paper has been
536 removed from the distribution, as it is mostly supplanted by the user's
537 manual by this point.
541 SF#1217699 + SF#1381867: The prefix= argument to PBChangeSource has been
542 changed: now it does just a simple string-prefix match and strip. The
543 previous behavior was buggy and unhelpful. NOTE: if you were using prefix=
544 before, you probably need to add a slash to the end of it.
546 SF#1398174: ignore SVN property changes better, fixed by Olivier Bonnet
548 SF#1452801: don't double-escape the build URL, fixed by Olivier Bonnet
550 SF#1401121: add support for running py2exe on windows, by Mark Hammond
552 reloading unchanged config files with WithProperties shouldn't change anything.
554 All svn commands now include --non-interactive so they won't ask for
555 passwords. Instead, the command will fail if it cannot be performed without
558 Deprecation warnings with newer versions of Twisted have been hushed.
562 I haven't actually removed support for Twisted-1.3.0 yet, but I'd like to.
564 The step_twisted default value for --reporter matches modern Twisteds,
565 though, and won't work under 1.3.0.
567 ShellCommand.flunkOnFailure now defaults to True, so any shell command which
568 fails counts as a build failure. Set this to False if you don't want this
573 contrib/darcs_buildbot.py contains a new script suitable for use in a darcs
576 Hovering a cursor over the yellow "Build #123" box in the Waterfall display
577 will pop up an HTML tooltip to show the reason for the build. Thanks to Zandr
578 Milewski for the suggestion.
580 contrib/CSS/*.css now contains several contributed stylesheets to make the
581 Waterfall display a bit less ugly. Thanks to John O'Duinn for gathering them.
583 ShellCommand and its derivatives can now accept either a string or a list of
584 strings in the description= and descriptionDone= arguments. Thanks to Paul
585 Winkler for the catch.
588 * Release 0.7.3 (23 May 2006)
592 This release is compatible with Twisted-1.3.0, but the next one will not be.
593 Please upgrade to at least Twisted-2.0.x soon, as the next buildbot release
598 *** Mercurial support
600 Support for Mercurial version control system (http://selenic.com/mercurial)
601 has been added. This adds a buildbot.process.step.Mercurial BuildStep. A
602 suitable hook script to deliver changes to the buildmaster is still missing.
604 *** 'buildbot restart' command
606 The 'buildbot restart BASEDIR' command will perform a 'buildbot stop' and
607 'buildbot start', and will attempt to wait for the buildbot process to shut
608 down in between. This is useful when you need to upgrade the code on your
609 buildmaster or buildslave and want to take it down for a minimum amount of
614 Each build now has a set of named "Build Properties", which can be set by
615 steps and interpolated into ShellCommands. The 'revision' and 'got_revision'
616 properties are the most interesting ones available at this point, and can be
617 used e.g. to get the VC revision number into the filename of a generated
618 tarball. See the user's manual section entited "Build Properties" for more
623 *** IRC now takes password= argument
625 Useful for letting your bot claim a persistent identity.
627 *** svn_buildbot.py is easier to modify to understand branches
628 *** BuildFactory has a new .addStep method
629 *** p4poller has new arguments
630 *** new contrib scripts: viewcvspoll, svnpoller, svn_watcher
632 These poll an external VC repository to watch for changes, as opposed to
633 adding a hook script to the repository that pushes changes into the
634 buildmaster. This means higher latency but may be easier to configure,
635 especially if you do not have authority on the repository host.
637 *** VC build property 'got_revision'
639 The 'got_revision' property reports what revision a VC step actually
640 acquired, which may be useful to know when building from HEAD.
642 *** improved CSS in Waterfall
644 The Waterfall display has a few new class= tags, which may make it easier to
645 write custom CSS to make it look prettier.
647 *** robots_txt= argument in Waterfall
649 You can now pass a filename to the robots_txt= argument, which will be served
650 as the "robots.txt" file. This can be used to discourage search engine
651 spiders from crawling through the numerous build-status pages.
655 *** tests more likely to pass on non-English systems
657 The unit test suite now sets $LANG='C' to make subcommands emit error
658 messages in english instead of whatever native language is in use on the
659 host. This improves the chances that the unit tests will pass on such
660 systems. This affects certain VC-related subcommands too.
662 test_vc was assuming that the system time was expressed with a numeric
663 timezone, which is not always the case, especially under windows. This
664 probably works better now than it did before. This only affects the CVS
667 'buildbot try' (for CVS) now uses UTC instead of the local timezone. The
668 'got_revision' property is also expressed in UTC. Both should help deal with
669 buggy versions of CVS that don't parse numeric timezones properly.
672 * Release 0.7.2 (17 Feb 2006)
676 *** all TCP port numbers in config file now accept a strports string
678 Sometimes it is useful to restrict certain TCP ports that the buildmaster
679 listens on to use specific network interfaces. In particular, if the
680 buildmaster and SVN repository live on the same machine, you may want to
681 restrict the PBChangeSource to only listen on the loopback interface,
682 insuring that no external entities can inject Changes into the buildbot.
683 Likewise, if you are using something like Apache's reverse-proxy feature to
684 provide access to the buildmaster's HTML status page, you might want to hide
685 the real Waterfall port by having it only bind to the loopback interface.
687 To accomplish this, use a string like "tcp:12345:interface=127.0.0.1" instead
688 of a number like 12345. These strings are called "strports specification
689 strings", and are documented in twisted's twisted.application.strports module
690 (you can probably type 'pydoc twisted.application.strports' to see this
691 documentation). Pretty much everywhere the buildbot takes a port number will
692 now accept a strports spec, and any bare numbers are translated into TCP port
693 numbers (listening on all network interfaces) for compatibility.
695 *** buildslave --umask control
697 Twisted's daemonization utility (/usr/bin/twistd) automatically sets the
698 umask to 077, which means that all files generated by both the buildmaster
699 and the buildslave will only be readable by the account under which the
700 respective daemon is running. This makes it unnecessarily difficult to share
701 build products (e.g. by symlinking ~/public_html/current_docs/ to a directory
702 within the slave's build directory where each build puts the results of a
705 The 'buildbot slave <PARAMS>' command now accepts a --umask argument, which
706 can be used to override the umask set by twistd. If you create the buildslave
707 with '--umask=022', then all build products will be world-readable, making it
708 easier for other processes (run under other accounts) to access them.
712 The 0.7.1 release had a bug whereby reloading the config file could break all
713 configured Schedulers, causing them to raise an exception when new changes
714 arrived but not actually schedule a new build. This has been fixed.
716 Fixed a bug which caused the AnyBranchScheduler to explode when branch==None.
717 Thanks to Kevin Turner for the catch. I also think I fixed a bug whereby the
718 TryScheduler would explode when it was given a Change (which it is supposed
721 The Waterfall display now does more quoting of names (including Builder
722 names, BuildStep names, etc), so it is more likely that these names can
723 contain unusual characters like spaces, quotes, and slashes. There may still
724 be some problems with these kinds of names, however.. please report any bugs
728 * Release 0.7.1 (26 Nov 2005)
732 *** scheduler.Nightly
734 Dobes Vandermeer contributed a cron-style 'Nightly' scheduler. Unlike the
735 more-primitive Periodic class (which only lets you specify the duration
736 between build attempts), Nightly lets you schedule builds for specific times
737 of day, week, month, or year. The interface is very much like the crontab(5)
738 file. See the buildbot.scheduler.Nightly docstring for complete details.
740 ** minor new features
742 *** step.Trial can work with Trial from Twisted >2.1.0
744 The 'Trial' step now accepts the trialMode= argument, which should be a list
745 of strings to be added to trial's argv array. This defaults to ["-to"], which
746 is appropriate for the Trial that ships in Twisted-2.1.0 and earlier, and
747 tells Trial to emit non-colorized verbose output. To use this step with
748 trials from later versions of Twisted, this should be changed to
749 ["--reporter=bwverbose"].
751 In addition, you can now set other Trial command-line parameters through the
752 trialArgs= argument. This is a list of strings, and defaults to an empty list.
754 *** Added a 'resubmit this build' button to the web page
756 *** Make the VC-checkout step's description more useful
758 Added the word "[branch]" to the VC step's description (used in the Step's
759 box on the Waterfall page, among others) when we're checking out a
760 non-default branch. Also add "rNNN" where appropriate to indicate which
761 revision is being checked out. Thanks to Brad Hards and Nathaniel Smith for
766 Several patches from Dobes Vandermeer: Escape the URLs in email, in case they
767 have spaces and such. Fill otherwise-empty <td> elements, as a workaround for
768 buggy browsers that might optimize them away. Also use binary mode when
769 opening status pickle files, to make windows work better. The
770 AnyBranchScheduler now works even when you don't provide a fileIsImportant=
773 Stringify the base revision before stuffing it into a 'try' jobfile, helping
774 SVN and Arch implement 'try' builds better. Thanks to Steven Walter for the
777 Fix the compare_attrs list in PBChangeSource, FreshCVSSource, and Waterfall.
778 Before this, certain changes to these objects in the master.cfg file were
779 ignored, such that you would have to stop and re-start the buildmaster to
780 make them take effect.
782 The config file is now loaded serially, shutting down old (or replaced)
783 Status/ChangeSource plugins before starting new ones. This fixes a bug in
784 which changing an aspect of, say, the Waterfall display would cause an
785 exception as both old and new instances fight over the same TCP port. This
786 should also fix a bug whereby new Periodic Schedulers could fire a build
787 before the Builders have finished being added.
789 There was a bug in the way Locks were handled when the config file was
790 reloaded: changing one Builder (but not the others) and reloading master.cfg
791 would result in multiple instances of the same Lock object, so the Locks
792 would fail to prevent simultaneous execution of Builds or Steps. This has
797 For a long time, certain StatusReceiver methods (like buildStarted and
798 stepStarted) have been able to return another StatusReceiver instance
799 (usually 'self') to indicate that they wish to subscribe to events within the
800 new object. For example, if the buildStarted() method returns 'self', the
801 status receiver will also receive events for the new build, like
802 stepStarted() and buildETAUpdate(). Returning a 'self' from buildStarted() is
803 equivalent to calling build.subscribe(self).
805 Starting with buildbot-0.7.1, this auto-subscribe convenience will also
806 register to automatically unsubscribe the target when the build or step has
807 finished, just as if build.unsubscribe(self) had been called. Also, the
808 unsubscribe() method has been changed to not explode if the same receiver is
809 unsubscribed multiple times. (note that it will still explode is the same
810 receiver is *subscribed* multiple times, so please continue to refrain from
814 * Release 0.7.0 (24 Oct 2005)
818 *** new c['schedulers'] config-file element (REQUIRED)
820 The code which decides exactly *when* a build is performed has been massively
821 refactored, enabling much more flexible build scheduling. YOU MUST UPDATE
822 your master.cfg files to match: in general this will merely require you to
823 add an appropriate c['schedulers'] entry. Any old ".treeStableTime" settings
824 on the BuildFactory instances will now be ignored. The user's manual has
825 complete details with examples of how the new Scheduler classes work.
827 *** c['interlocks'] removed, Locks and Dependencies now separate items
829 The c['interlocks'] config element has been removed, and its functionality
830 replaced with two separate objects. Locks are used to tell the buildmaster
831 that certain Steps or Builds should not run at the same time as other Steps
832 or Builds (useful for test suites that require exclusive access to some
833 external resource: of course the real fix is to fix the tests, because
834 otherwise your developers will be suffering from the same limitations). The
835 Lock object is created in the config file and then referenced by a Step
836 specification tuple or by the 'locks' key of the Builder specification
837 dictionary. Locks come in two flavors: MasterLocks are buildmaster-wide,
838 while SlaveLocks are specific to a single buildslave.
840 When you want to have one Build run or not run depending upon whether some
841 other set of Builds have passed or failed, you use a special kind of
842 Scheduler defined in the scheduler.Dependent class. This scheduler watches an
843 upstream Scheduler for builds of a given source version to complete, and only
844 fires off its own Builders when all of the upstream's Builders have built
845 that version successfully.
847 Both features are fully documented in the user's manual.
851 The 'try' feature has finally been added. There is some configuration
852 involved, both in the buildmaster config and on the developer's side, but
853 once in place this allows the developer to type 'buildbot try' in their
854 locally-modified tree and to be given a report of what would happen if their
855 changes were to be committed. This works by computing a (base revision,
856 patch) tuple that describes the developer's tree, sending that to the
857 buildmaster, then running a build with that source on a given set of
858 Builders. The 'buildbot try' tool then emits status messages until the builds
861 'try' exists to allow developers to run cross-platform tests on their code
862 before committing it, reducing the chances they will inconvenience other
863 developers by breaking the build. The UI is still clunky, but expect it to
864 change and improve over the next few releases.
866 Instructions for developers who want to use 'try' (and the configuration
867 changes necessary to enable its use) are in the user's manual.
871 When suitably configured, the buildbot can be used to build trees from a
872 variety of related branches. You can set up Schedulers to build a tree using
873 whichever branch was last changed, or users can request builds of specific
874 branches through IRC, the web page, or (eventually) the CLI 'buildbot force'
877 The IRC 'force' command now takes --branch and --revision arguments (not that
878 they always make sense). Likewise the HTML 'force build' button now has an
879 input field for branch and revision. Your build's source-checkout step must
880 be suitably configured to support this: for SVN it involves giving both a
881 base URL and a default branch. Other VC systems are configured differently.
882 The ChangeSource must also provide branch information: the 'buildbot
883 sendchange' command now takes a --branch argument to help hook script writers
886 *** Multiple slaves per Builder
888 You can now attach multiple buildslaves to each Builder. This can provide
889 redundancy or primitive load-balancing among many machines equally capable of
890 running the build. To use this, define a key in the Builder specification
891 dictionary named 'slavenames' with a list of buildslave names (instead of the
892 usual 'slavename' that contains just a single slavename).
894 *** minor new features
896 The IRC and email status-reporting facilities now provide more specific URLs
897 for particular builds, in addition to the generic buildmaster home page. The
898 HTML per-build page now has more information.
900 The Twisted-specific test classes have been modified to match the argument
901 syntax preferred by Trial as of Twisted-2.1.0 and newer. The generic trial
902 steps are still suitable for the Trial that comes with older versions of
903 Twisted, but may produce deprecation warnings or errors when used with the
908 DNotify, used by the maildir-watching ChangeSources, had problems on some
909 64-bit systems relating to signed-vs-unsigned constants and the DN_MULTISHOT
910 flag. A workaround was provided by Brad Hards.
912 The web status page should now be valid XHTML, thanks to a patch by Brad
913 Hards. The charset parameter is specified to be UTF-8, so VC comments,
914 builder names, etc, should probably all be in UTF-8 to be displayed properly.
916 ** creeping version dependencies
918 The IRC 'force build' command now requires python2.3 (for the shlex.split
922 * Release 0.6.6 (23 May 2005)
926 The 'sendchange', 'stop', and 'sighup' subcommands were broken, simple bugs
927 that were not caught by the test suite. Sorry.
929 The 'buildbot master' command now uses "raw" strings to create .tac files
930 that will still function under windows (since we must put directory names
931 that contain backslashes into that file).
933 The keep-on-disk behavior added in 0.6.5 included the ability to upgrade old
934 in-pickle LogFile instances. This upgrade function was not added to the
935 HTMLLogFile class, so an exception would be raised when attempting to load or
936 display any build with one of these logs (which are normally used only for
937 showing build exceptions). This has been fixed.
939 Several unnecessary imports were removed, so the Buildbot should function
940 normally with just Twisted-2.0.0's "Core" module installed. (of course you
941 will need TwistedWeb, TwistedWords, and/or TwistedMail if you use status
942 targets that require them). The test suite should skip all tests that cannot
943 be run because of missing Twisted modules.
945 The master/slave's basedir is now prepended to sys.path before starting the
946 daemon. This used to happen implicitly (as a result of twistd's setup
947 preamble), but 0.6.5 internalized the invocation of twistd and did not copy
948 this behavior. This change restores the ability to access "private.py"-style
949 modules in the basedir from the master.cfg file with a simple "import
950 private" statement. Thanks to Thomas Vander Stichele for the catch.
953 * Release 0.6.5 (18 May 2005)
955 ** deprecated config keys removed
957 The 'webPortnum', 'webPathname', 'irc', and 'manholePort' config-file keys,
958 which were deprecated in the previous release, have now been removed. In
959 addition, Builders must now always be configured with dictionaries: the
960 support for configuring them with tuples has been removed.
962 ** master/slave creation and startup changed
964 The buildbot no longer uses .tap files to store serialized representations of
965 the buildmaster/buildslave applications. Instead, this release now uses .tac
966 files, which are human-readable scripts that create new instances (rather
967 than .tap files, which were pickles of pre-created instances). 'mktap
970 You will need to update your buildbot directories to handle this. The
971 procedure is the same as creating a new buildmaster or buildslave: use
972 'buildbot master BASEDIR' or 'buildbot slave BASEDIR ARGS..'. This will
973 create a 'buildbot.tac' file in the target directory. The 'buildbot start
974 BASEDIR' will use twistd to start the application.
976 The 'buildbot start' command now looks for a Makefile.buildbot, and if it
977 finds one (and /usr/bin/make exists), it will use it to start the application
978 instead of calling twistd directly. This allows you to customize startup,
979 perhaps by adding environment variables. The setup commands create a sample
980 file in Makefile.sample, but you must copy this to Makefile.buildbot to
981 actually use it. The previous release looked for a bare 'Makefile', and also
982 installed a 'Makefile', so you were always using the customized approach,
983 even if you didn't ask for it. That old Makefile launched the .tap file, so
984 changing names was also necessary to make sure that the new 'buildbot start'
985 doesn't try to run the old .tap file.
987 'buildbot stop' now uses os.kill instead of spawning an external process,
988 making it more likely to work under windows. It waits up to 5 seconds for the
989 daemon to go away, so you can now do 'buildbot stop BASEDIR; buildbot start
990 BASEDIR' with less risk of launching the new daemon before the old one has
991 fully shut down. Likewise, 'buildbot start' imports twistd's internals
992 directly instead of spawning an external copy, so it should work better under
997 All of the old Lore-based documents were converted into a new Texinfo-format
998 manual, and considerable new text was added to describe the installation
999 process. The docs are not yet complete, but they're slowly shaping up to form
1000 a proper user's manual.
1004 Arch checkouts can now use precise revision stamps instead of always using
1005 the latest revision. A separate Source step for using Bazaar (an alternative
1006 Arch client) instead of 'tla' was added. A Source step for Cogito (the new
1007 linux kernel VC system) was contributed by Brandon Philips. All Source steps
1008 now accept a retry= argument to indicate that failing VC checkouts should be
1009 retried a few times (SF#1200395), note that this requires an updated
1012 The 'buildbot sendchange' command was added, to be used in VC hook scripts to
1013 send changes at a pb.PBChangeSource . contrib/arch_buildbot.py was added to
1014 use this tool; it should be installed using the 'Arch meta hook' scheme.
1016 Changes can now accept a branch= parameter, and Builders have an
1017 isBranchImportant() test that acts like isFileImportant(). Thanks to Thomas
1018 Vander Stichele. Note: I renamed his tag= to branch=, in anticipation of an
1019 upcoming feature to build specific branches. "tag" seemed too CVS-centric.
1021 LogFiles have been rewritten to stream the incoming data directly to disk
1022 rather than keeping a copy in memory all the time (SF#1200392). This
1023 drastically reduces the buildmaster's memory requirements and makes 100MB+
1024 log files feasible. The log files are stored next to the serialized Builds,
1025 in files like BASEDIR/builder-dir/12-log-compile-output, so you'll want a
1026 cron job to delete old ones just like you do with old Builds. Old-style
1027 Builds from 0.6.4 and earlier are converted when they are first read, so the
1028 first load of the Waterfall display after updating to this release may take
1031 ** build process updates
1033 BuildSteps can now return a status of EXCEPTION, which terminates the build
1034 right away. This allows exceptions to be caught right away, but still make
1035 sure the build stops quickly.
1039 Some more windows incompatibilities were fixed. The test suite now has two
1040 failing tests remaining, both of which appear to be Twisted issues that
1041 should not affect normal operation.
1043 The test suite no longer raises any deprecation warnings when run against
1044 twisted-2.0 (except for the ones which come from Twisted itself).
1047 * Release 0.6.4 (28 Apr 2005)
1051 The 'buildbot' tool in 0.6.3, when used to create a new buildmaster, failed
1052 unless it found a 'changes.pck' file. As this file is created by a running
1053 buildmaster, this made 0.6.3 completely unusable for first-time
1054 installations. This has been fixed.
1058 The IRC bot had a bug wherein asking it to watch a certain builder (the "I'll
1059 give a shout when the build finishes" message) would cause an exception, so
1060 it would not, in fact, shout. The HTML page had an exception in the "change
1061 sources" page (reached by following the "Changes" link at the top of the
1062 column that shows the names of commiters). Re-loading the config file while
1063 builders were already attached would result in a benign error message. The
1064 server side of the PBListener status client had an exception when providing
1065 information about a non-existent Build (e.g., when the client asks for the
1066 Build that is currently running, and the server says "None").
1068 These bugs have all been fixed.
1070 The unit tests now pass under python2.2; they were failing before because of
1071 some 2.3isms that crept in. More unit tests which failed under windows now
1072 pass, only one (test_webPathname_port) is still failing.
1074 ** 'buildbot' tool looks for a .buildbot/options file
1076 The 'statusgui' and the 'debugclient' subcommands can both look for a
1077 .buildbot/ directory, and an 'options' file therein, to extract default
1078 values for the location of the buildmaster. This directory is searched in the
1079 current directory, its parent, etc, all the way up to the filesystem root
1080 (assuming you own the directories in question). It also look in ~/.buildbot/
1081 for this file. This feature allows you to put a .buildbot at the top of your
1082 working tree, telling any 'buildbot' invocations you perform therein how to
1083 get to the buildmaster associated with that tree's project.
1085 Windows users get something similar, using %APPDATA%/buildbot instead of
1088 ** windows ShellCommands are launched with 'cmd.exe'
1090 The buildslave has been modified to run all list-based ShellCommands by
1091 prepending [os.environ['COMSPEC'], '/c'] to the argv list before execution.
1092 This should allow the buildslave's PATH to be searched for commands,
1093 improving the chances that it can run the same 'trial -o foo' commands as a
1094 unix buildslave. The potential downside is that spaces in argv elements might
1095 be re-parsed, or quotes might be re-interpreted. The consensus on the mailing
1096 list was that this is a useful thing to do, but please report any problems
1097 you encounter with it.
1101 The Waterfall display now shows the buildbot's home timezone at the top of
1102 the timestamp column. The default favicon.ico is now much nicer-looking (it
1103 is generated with Blender.. the icon.blend file is available in CVS in
1104 docs/images/ should you care to play with it).
1108 * Release 0.6.3 (25 Apr 2005)
1110 ** 'buildbot' tool gets more uses
1112 The 'buildbot' executable has acquired three new subcommands. 'buildbot
1113 debugclient' brings up the small remote-control panel that connects to a
1114 buildmaster (via the slave port and the c['debugPassword']). This tool,
1115 formerly in contrib/debugclient.py, lets you reload the config file, force
1116 builds, and simulate inbound commit messages. It requires gtk2, glade, and
1117 the python bindings for both to be installed.
1119 'buildbot statusgui' brings up a live status client, formerly available by
1120 running buildbot/clients/gtkPanes.py as a program. This connects to the PB
1121 status port that you create with:
1123 c['status'].append(client.PBListener(portnum))
1125 and shows two boxes per Builder, one for the last build, one for current
1126 activity. These boxes are updated in realtime. The effect is primitive, but
1127 is intended as an example of what's possible with the PB status interface.
1129 'buildbot statuslog' provides a text-based running log of buildmaster events.
1131 Note: command names are subject to change. These should get much more useful
1134 ** web page has a favicon
1136 When constructing the html.Waterfall instance, you can provide the filename
1137 of an image that will be provided when the "favicon.ico" resource is
1138 requested. Many web browsers display this as an icon next to the URL or
1139 bookmark. A goofy little default icon is included.
1143 Thanks to Thomas Vander Stichele, the Waterfall page is now themable through
1144 CSS. The default CSS is located in buildbot/status/classic.css, and creates a
1145 page that is mostly identical to the old, non-CSS based table.
1147 You can specify a different CSS file to use by passing it as the css=
1148 argument to html.Waterfall(). See the docstring for Waterfall for some more
1151 ** builder "categories"
1153 Thomas has added code which places each Builder in an optional "category".
1154 The various status targets (Waterfall, IRC, MailNotifier) can accept a list
1155 of categories, and they will ignore any activity in builders outside this
1156 list. This makes it easy to create some Builders which are "experimental" or
1157 otherwise not yet ready for the world to see, or indicate that certain
1158 builders should not harass developers when their tests fail, perhaps because
1159 the build slaves for them are not yet fully functional.
1161 ** Deprecated features
1163 *** defining Builders with tuples is deprecated
1165 For a long time, the preferred way to define builders in the config file has
1166 been with a dictionary. The less-flexible old style of a 4-item tuple (name,
1167 slavename, builddir, factory) is now officially deprecated (i.e., it will
1168 emit a warning if you use it), and will be removed in the next release.
1169 Dictionaries are more flexible: additional keys like periodicBuildTime are
1170 simply unavailable to tuple-defined builders.
1172 Note: it is a good idea to watch the logfile (usually in twistd.log) when you
1173 first start the buildmaster, or whenever you reload the config file. Any
1174 warnings or errors in the config file will be found there.
1176 *** c['webPortnum'], c['webPathname'], c['irc'] are deprecated
1178 All status reporters should be defined in the c['status'] array, using
1179 buildbot.status.html.Waterfall or buildbot.status.words.IRC . These have been
1180 deprecated for a while, but this is fair warning that these keys will be
1181 removed in the next release.
1183 *** c['manholePort'] is deprecated
1185 Again, this has been deprecated for a while, in favor of:
1187 c['manhole'] = master.Manhole(port, username, password)
1189 The preferred syntax will eventually let us use other, better kinds of debug
1190 shells, such as the experimental curses-based ones in the Twisted sandbox
1191 (which would offer command-line editing and history).
1195 The waterfall page has been improved a bit. A circular-reference bug in the
1196 web page's TextLog class was fixed, which caused a major memory leak in a
1197 long-running buildmaster with large logfiles that are viewed frequently.
1198 Modifying the config file in a way which only changed a builder's base
1199 directory now works correctly. The 'buildbot' command tries to create
1200 slightly more useful master/slave directories, adding a Makefile entry to
1201 re-create the .tap file, and removing global-read permissions from the files
1202 that may contain buildslave passwords.
1204 ** twisted-2.0.0 compatibility
1206 Both buildmaster and buildslave should run properly under Twisted-2.0 . There
1207 are still some warnings about deprecated functions, some of which could be
1208 fixed, but there are others that would require removing compatibility with
1209 Twisted-1.3, and I don't expect to do that until 2.0 has been out and stable
1210 for at least several months. The unit tests should pass under 2.0, whereas
1211 the previous buildbot release had tests which could hang when run against the
1212 new "trial" framework in 2.0.
1214 The Twisted-specific steps (including Trial) have been updated to match 2.0
1217 ** win32 compatibility
1219 Thankt to Nick Trout, more compatibility fixes have been incorporated,
1220 improving the chances that the unit tests will pass on windows systems. There
1221 are still some problems, and a step-by-step "running buildslaves on windows"
1222 document would be greatly appreciated.
1226 Thanks to Thomas Vander Stichele, most of the docstrings have been converted
1227 to epydoc format. There is a utility in docs/gen-reference to turn these into
1228 a tree of cross-referenced HTML pages. Eventually these docs will be
1229 auto-generated and somehow published on the buildbot web page.
1233 * Release 0.6.2 (13 Dec 2004)
1237 It is now possible to interrupt a running build. Both the web page and the
1238 IRC bot feature 'stop build' commands, which can be used to interrupt the
1239 current BuildStep and accelerate the termination of the overall Build. The
1240 status reporting for these still leaves something to be desired (an
1241 'interrupt' event is pushed into the column, and the reason for the interrupt
1242 is added to a pseudo-logfile for the step that was stopped, but if you only
1243 look at the top-level status it appears that the build failed on its own).
1245 Builds are also halted if the connection to the buildslave is lost. On the
1246 slave side, any active commands are halted if the connection to the
1247 buildmaster is lost.
1249 ** minor new features
1251 The IRC log bot now reports ETA times in a MMSS format like "2m45s" instead
1252 of the clunky "165 seconds".
1256 *** Slave Disconnect
1258 Slave disconnects should be handled better now: the current build should be
1259 abandoned properly. Earlier versions could get into weird states where the
1260 build failed to finish, clogging the builder forever (or at least until the
1261 buildmaster was restarted).
1263 In addition, there are weird network conditions which could cause a
1264 buildslave to attempt to connect twice to the same buildmaster. This can
1265 happen when the slave is sending large logfiles over a slow link, while using
1266 short keepalive timeouts. The buildmaster has been fixed to allow the second
1267 connection attempt to take precedence over the first, so that the older
1268 connection is jettisoned to make way for the newer one.
1270 In addition, the buildslave has been fixed to be less twitchy about timeouts.
1271 There are now two parameters: keepaliveInterval (which is controlled by the
1272 mktap 'keepalive' argument), and keepaliveTimeout (which requires editing the
1273 .py source to change from the default of 30 seconds). The slave expects to
1274 see *something* from the master at least once every keepaliveInterval
1275 seconds, and will try to provoke a response (by sending a keepalive request)
1276 'keepaliveTimeout' seconds before the end of this interval just in case there
1277 was no regular traffic. Any kind of traffic will qualify, including
1278 acknowledgements of normal build-status updates.
1280 The net result is that, as long as any given PB message can be sent over the
1281 wire in less than 'keepaliveTimeout' seconds, the slave should not mistakenly
1282 disconnect because of a timeout. There will be traffic on the wire at least
1283 every 'keepaliveInterval' seconds, which is what you want to pay attention to
1284 if you're trying to keep an intervening NAT box from dropping what it thinks
1285 is an abandoned connection. A quiet loss of connection will be detected
1286 within 'keepaliveInterval' seconds.
1290 The web page rendering code has been fixed to deliver large logfiles in
1291 pieces, using a producer/consumer apparatus. This avoids the large spike in
1292 memory consumption when the log file body was linearized into a single string
1293 and then buffered in the socket's application-side transmit buffer. This
1294 should also avoid the 640k single-string limit for web.distrib servers that
1295 could be hit by large (>640k) logfiles.
1299 * Release 0.6.1 (23 Nov 2004)
1301 ** win32 improvements/bugfixes
1303 Several changes have gone in to improve portability to non-unix systems. It
1304 should be possible to run a build slave under windows without major issues
1305 (although step-by-step documentation is still greatly desired: check the
1306 mailing list for suggestions from current win32 users).
1308 *** PBChangeSource: use configurable directory separator, not os.sep
1310 The PBChangeSource, which listens on a TCP socket for change notices
1311 delivered from tools like contrib/svn_buildbot.py, was splitting source
1312 filenames with os.sep . This is inappropriate, because those file names are
1313 coming from the VC repository, not the local filesystem, and the repository
1314 host may be running a different OS (with a different separator convention)
1315 than the buildmaster host. In particular, a win32 buildmaster using a CVS
1316 repository running on a unix box would be confused.
1318 PBChangeSource now takes a sep= argument to indicate the separator character
1321 *** build saving should work better
1323 windows cannot do the atomic os.rename() trick that unix can, so under win32
1324 the buildmaster falls back to save/delete-old/rename, which carries a slight
1325 risk of losing a saved build log (if the system were to crash between the
1326 delete-old and the rename).
1330 *** test-result tracking
1332 Work has begun on fine-grained test-result handling. The eventual goal is to
1333 be able to track individual tests over time, and create problem reports when
1334 a test starts failing (which then are resolved when the test starts passing
1335 again). The first step towards this is an ITestResult interface, and code in
1336 the TrialTestParser to create such results for all non-passing tests (the
1337 ones for which Trial emits exception tracebacks).
1339 These test results are currently displayed in a tree-like display in a page
1340 accessible from each Build's page (follow the numbered link in the yellow
1341 box at the start of each build to get there).
1343 This interface is still in flux, as it really wants to be able to accomodate
1344 things like compiler warnings and tests that are skipped because of missing
1345 libraries or unsupported architectures.
1349 *** VC updates should survive temporary failures
1351 Some VC systems (CVS and SVN in particular) get upset when files are turned
1352 into directories or vice versa, or when repository items are moved without
1353 the knowledge of the VC system. The usual symptom is that a 'cvs update'
1354 fails where a fresh checkout succeeds.
1356 To avoid having to manually intervene, the build slaves' VC commands have
1357 been refactored to respond to update failures by deleting the tree and
1358 attempting a full checkout. This may cause some unnecessary effort when,
1359 e.g., the CVS server falls off the net, but in the normal case it will only
1360 come into play when one of these can't-cope situations arises.
1362 *** forget about an existing build when the slave detaches
1364 If the slave was lost during a build, the master did not clear the
1365 .currentBuild reference, making that builder unavailable for later builds.
1366 This has been fixed, so that losing a slave should be handled better. This
1367 area still needs some work, I think it's still possible to get both the
1368 slave and the master wedged by breaking the connection at just the right
1369 time. Eventually I want to be able to resume interrupted builds (especially
1370 when the interruption is the result of a network failure and not because the
1371 slave or the master actually died).
1373 *** large logfiles now consume less memory
1375 Build logs are stored as lists of (type,text) chunks, so that
1376 stdout/stderr/headers can be displayed differently (if they were
1377 distinguishable when they were generated: stdout and stderr are merged when
1378 usePTY=1). For multi-megabyte logfiles, a large list with many short strings
1379 could incur a large overhead. The new behavior is to merge same-type string
1380 chunks together as they are received, aiming for a chunk size of about 10kb,
1381 which should bring the overhead down to a more reasonable level.
1383 There remains an issue with actually delivering large logfiles over, say,
1384 the HTML interface. The string chunks must be merged together into a single
1385 string before delivery, which causes a spike in the memory usage when the
1386 logfile is viewed. This can also break twisted.web.distrib -type servers,
1387 where the underlying PB protocol imposes a 640k limit on the size of
1388 strings. This will be fixed (with a proper Producer/Consumer scheme) in the
1392 * Release 0.6.0 (30 Sep 2004)
1396 *** /usr/bin/buildbot control tool
1398 There is now an executable named 'buildbot'. For now, this just provides a
1399 convenient front-end to mktap/twistd/kill, but eventually it will provide
1400 access to other client functionality (like the 'try' builds, and a status
1401 client). Assuming you put your buildbots in /var/lib/buildbot/master/FOO,
1402 you can do 'buildbot create-master /var/lib/buildbot/master/FOO' and it will
1403 create the .tap file and set up a sample master.cfg for you. Later,
1404 'buildbot start /var/lib/buildbot/master/FOO' will start the daemon.
1407 *** build status now saved in external files, -shutdown.tap unnecessary
1409 The status rewrite included a change to save all build status in a set of
1410 external files. These files, one per build, are put in a subdirectory of the
1411 master's basedir (named according to the 'builddir' parameter of the Builder
1412 configuration dictionary). This helps keep the buildmaster's memory
1413 consumption small: the (potentially large) build logs are kept on disk
1414 instead of in RAM. There is a small cache (2 builds per builder) kept in
1415 memory, but everything else lives on disk.
1417 The big change is that the buildmaster now keeps *all* status in these
1418 files. It is no longer necessary to preserve the buildbot-shutdown.tap file
1419 to run a persistent buildmaster. The buildmaster may be launched with
1420 'twistd -f buildbot.tap' each time, in fact the '-n' option can be added to
1421 prevent twistd from automatically creating the -shutdown.tap file.
1423 There is still one lingering bug with this change: the Expectations object
1424 for each builder (which records how long the various steps took, to provide
1425 an ETA value for the next time) is not yet saved. The result is that the
1426 first build after a restart will not provide an ETA value.
1428 0.6.0 keeps status in a single file per build, as opposed to 0.5.0 which
1429 kept status in many subdirectories (one layer for builds, another for steps,
1430 and a third for logs). 0.6.0 will detect and delete these subdirectories as
1433 The saved builds are optional. To prevent disk usage from growing without
1434 bounds, you may want to set up a cron job to run 'find' and delete any which
1435 are too old. The status displays will happily survive without those saved
1438 The set of recorded Changes is kept in a similar file named 'changes.pck'.
1441 *** source checkout now uses timestamp/revision
1443 Source checkouts are now performed with an appropriate -D TIMESTAMP (for
1444 CVS) or -r REVISION (for SVN) marker to obtain the exact sources that were
1445 specified by the most recent Change going into the current Build. This
1446 avoids a race condition in which a change might be committed after the build
1447 has started but before the source checkout has completed, resulting in a
1448 mismatched set of source files. Such changes are now ignored.
1450 This works by keeping track of repository-wide revision/transaction numbers
1451 (for version control systems that offer them, like SVN). The checkout or
1452 update is performed with the highest such revision number. For CVS (which
1453 does not have them), the timestamp of each commit message is used, and a -D
1454 argument is created to place the checkout squarely in the middle of the "tree
1455 stable timer"'s window.
1457 This also provides the infrastructure for the upcoming 'try' feature. All
1458 source-checkout commands can now obtain a base revision marker and a patch
1459 from the Build, allowing certain builds to be performed on something other
1460 than the most recent sources.
1462 See source.xhtml and steps.xhtml for details.
1465 *** Darcs and Arch support added
1467 There are now build steps which retrieve a source tree from Darcs and Arch
1468 repositories. See steps.xhtml for details.
1470 Preliminary P4 support has been added, thanks to code from Dave Peticolas.
1471 You must manually set up each build slave with an appropriate P4CLIENT: all
1472 buildbot does is run 'p4 sync' at the appropriate times.
1475 *** Status reporting rewritten
1477 Status reporting was completely revamped. The config file now accepts a
1478 BuildmasterConfig['status'] entry, with a list of objects that perform status
1479 delivery. The old config file entries which controlled the web status port
1480 and the IRC bot have been deprecated in favor of adding instances to
1481 ['status']. The following status-delivery classes have been implemented, all
1482 in the 'buildbot.status' package:
1484 client.PBListener(port, username, passwd)
1485 html.Waterfall(http_port, distrib_port)
1486 mail.MailNotifier(fromaddr, mode, extraRecipients..)
1487 words.IRC(host, nick, channels)
1489 See the individual docstrings for details about how to use each one. You can
1490 create new status-delivery objects by following the interfaces found in the
1491 buildbot.interfaces module.
1494 *** BuildFactory configuration process changed
1496 The basic BuildFactory class is now defined in buildbot.process.factory
1497 rather than buildbot.process.base, so you will have to update your config
1498 files. factory.BuildFactory is the base class, which accepts a list of Steps
1499 to run. See docs/factories.xhtml for details.
1501 There are now easier-to-use BuildFactory classes for projects which use GNU
1502 Autoconf, perl's MakeMaker (CPAN), python's distutils (but no unit tests),
1503 and Twisted's Trial. Each one takes a separate 'source' Step to obtain the
1504 source tree, and then fills in the rest of the Steps for you.
1507 *** CVS/SVN VC steps unified, simplified
1509 The confusing collection of arguments for the CVS step ('clobber=',
1510 'copydir=', and 'export=') have been removed in favor of a single 'mode'
1511 argument. This argument describes how you want to use the sources: whether
1512 you want to update and compile everything in the same tree (mode='update'),
1513 or do a fresh checkout and full build each time (mode='clobber'), or
1514 something in between.
1516 The SVN (Subversion) step has been unified and accepts the same mode=
1517 parameter as CVS. New version control steps will obey the same interface.
1519 Most of the old configuration arguments have been removed. You will need to
1520 update your configuration files to use the new arguments. See
1521 docs/steps.xhtml for a description of all the new parameters.
1524 *** Preliminary Debian packaging added
1526 Thanks to the contributions of Kirill Lapshin, we can now produce .deb
1527 installer packages. These are still experimental, but they include init.d
1528 startup/shutdown scripts, which the the new /usr/bin/buildbot to invoke
1529 twistd. Create your buildmasters in /var/lib/buildbot/master/FOO, and your
1530 slaves in /var/lib/buildbot/slave/BAR, then put FOO and BAR in the
1531 appropriate places in /etc/default/buildbot . After that, the buildmasters
1532 and slaves will be started at every boot.
1534 Pre-built .debs are not yet distributed. Use 'debuild -uc -us' from the
1535 source directory to create them.
1543 Each build now has a "source stamp" which describes what sources it used. The
1544 idea is that the sources for this particular build can be completely
1545 regenerated from the stamp. The stamp is a tuple of (revision, patch), where
1546 the revision depends on the VC system being used (for CVS it is either a
1547 revision tag like "BUILDBOT-0_5_0" or a datestamp like "2004/07/23", for
1548 Subversion it is a revision number like 11455). This must be combined with
1549 information from the Builder that is constant across all builds (something to
1550 point at the repository, and possibly a branch indicator for CVS and other VC
1551 systems that don't fold this into the repository string).
1553 The patch is an optional unified diff file, ready to be applied by running
1554 'patch -p0 <PATCH' from inside the workdir. This provides support for the
1555 'try' feature that will eventually allow developers to run buildbot tests on
1556 their code before checking it in.
1559 *** SIGHUP causes the buildmaster's configuration file to be re-read
1561 *** IRC bot now has 'watch' command
1563 You can now tell the buildbot's IRC bot to 'watch <buildername>' on a builder
1564 which is currently performing a build. When that build is finished, the
1565 buildbot will make an announcement (including the results of the build).
1567 The IRC 'force build' command will also announce when the resulting build has
1571 *** the 'force build' option on HTML and IRC status targets can be disabled
1573 The html.Waterfall display and the words.IRC bot may be constructed with an
1574 allowForce=False argument, which removes the ability to force a build through
1575 these interfaces. Future versions will be able to restrict this build-forcing
1576 capability to authenticated users. The per-builder HTML page no longer
1577 displays the 'Force Build' buttons if it does not have this ability. Thanks
1578 to Fred Drake for code and design suggestions.
1581 *** master now takes 'projectName' and 'projectURL' settings
1583 These strings allow the buildbot to describe what project it is working for.
1584 At the moment they are only displayed on the Waterfall page, but in the next
1585 release they will be retrieveable from the IRC bot as well.
1588 *** survive recent (SVN) Twisted versions
1590 The buildbot should run correctly (albeit with plenty of noisy deprecation
1591 warnings) under the upcoming Twisted-2.0 release.
1594 *** work-in-progress realtime Trial results acquisition
1596 Jonathan Simms (<slyphon>) has been working on 'retrial', a rewrite of
1597 Twisted's unit test framework that will most likely be available in
1598 Twisted-2.0 . Although it is not yet complete, the buildbot will be able to
1599 use retrial in such a way that build status is reported on a per-test basis,
1600 in real time. This will be the beginning of fine-grained test tracking and
1601 Problem management, described in docs/users.xhtml .
1604 * Release 0.5.0 (22 Jul 2004)
1608 *** web.distrib servers via TCP
1610 The 'webPathname' config option, which specifies a UNIX socket on which to
1611 publish the waterfall HTML page (for use by 'mktap web -u' or equivalent),
1612 now accepts a numeric port number. This publishes the same thing via TCP,
1613 allowing the parent web server to live on a separate machine.
1615 This config option could be named better, but it will go away altogether in
1616 a few releases, when status delivery is unified. It will be replaced with a
1617 WebStatusTarget object, and the config file will simply contain a list of
1618 various kinds of status targets.
1620 *** 'master.cfg' filename is configurable
1622 The buildmaster can use a config file named something other than
1623 "master.cfg". Use the --config=foo.cfg option to mktap to control this.
1625 *** FreshCVSSource now uses newcred (CVSToys >= 1.0.10)
1627 The FreshCVSSource class now defaults to speaking to freshcvs daemons from
1628 modern CVSToys releases. If you need to use the buildbot with a daemon from
1629 CVSToys-1.0.9 or earlier, use FreshCVSSourceOldcred instead. Note that the
1630 new form only requires host/port/username/passwd: the "serviceName"
1631 parameter is no longer meaningful.
1633 *** Builders are now configured with a dictionary, not a tuple
1635 The preferred way to set up a Builder in master.cfg is to provide a
1636 dictionary with various keys, rather than a (non-extensible) 4-tuple. See
1637 docs/config.xhtml for details. The old tuple-way is still supported for now,
1638 it will probably be deprecated in the next release and removed altogether in
1641 *** .periodicBuildTime is now exposed to the config file
1643 To set a builder to run at periodic intervals, simply add a
1644 'periodicBuildTime' key to its master.cfg dictionary. Again, see
1645 docs/config.xhtml for details.
1647 *** svn_buildbot.py adds --include, --exclude
1649 The commit trigger script now gives you more control over which files are
1650 sent to the buildmaster and which are not.
1652 *** usePTY is controllable at slave mktap time
1654 The buildslaves usually run their child processes in a pty, which creates a
1655 process group for all the children, which makes it much easier to kill them
1656 all at once (i.e. if a test hangs). However this causes problems on some
1657 systems. Rather than hacking slavecommand.py to disable the use of these
1658 ptys, you can now create the slave's .tap file with --usepty=0 at mktap
1663 A summary of warnings (e.g. DeprecationWarnings) is provided as part of the
1664 test-case summarizer. The summarizer also counts Skips, expectedFailures,
1665 and unexpectedSuccesses, displaying the counts on the test step's event box.
1667 The RunUnitTests step now uses "trial -R twisted" instead of "trial
1668 twisted.test", which is a bit cleaner. All .pyc files are deleted before
1669 starting trial, to avoid getting tripped up by deleted .py files.
1673 docs/config.xhtml now describes the syntax and allowed contents of the
1674 'master.cfg' configuration file.
1678 Interlocks had a race condition that could cause the lock to get stuck
1681 FreshCVSSource has a prefix= argument that was moderately broken (it used to
1682 only work if the prefix was a single directory component). It now works with
1685 The buildmaster used to complain when it saw the "info" directory in a
1686 slave's workspace. This directory is used to publish information about the
1687 slave host and its administrator, and is not a leftover build directory as
1688 the complaint suggested. This complain has been silenced.
1691 * Release 0.4.3 (30 Apr 2004)
1693 ** PBChangeSource made explicit
1695 In 0.4.2 and before, an internal interface was available which allowed
1696 special clients to inject changes into the Buildmaster. This interface is
1697 used by the contrib/svn_buildbot.py script. The interface has been extracted
1698 into a proper PBChangeSource object, which should be created in the
1699 master.cfg file just like the other kinds of ChangeSources. See
1700 docs/sources.xhtml for details.
1702 If you were implicitly using this change source (for example, if you use
1703 Subversion and the svn_buildbot.py script), you *must* add this source to
1704 your master.cfg file, or changes will not be delivered and no builds will be
1707 The PBChangeSource accepts the same "prefix" argument as all other
1708 ChangeSources. For a SVN repository that follows the recommended practice of
1709 using "trunk/" for the trunk revisions, you probably want to construct the
1712 source = PBChangeSource(prefix="trunk")
1714 to make sure that the Builders are given sensible (trunk-relative)
1715 filenames for each changed source file.
1719 *** step_twisted.RunUnitTests can change "bin/trial"
1721 The twisted RunUnitTests step was enhanced to let you run something other
1722 than "bin/trial", making it easier to use a buildbot on projects which use
1723 Twisted but aren't actually Twisted itself.
1725 *** Twisted now uses Subversion
1727 Now that Twisted has moved from CVS to SVN, the Twisted build processes have
1728 been modified to perform source checkouts from the Subversion repository.
1730 ** minor feature additions
1732 *** display Changes with HTML
1734 Changes are displayed with a bit more pizazz, and a links= argument was
1735 added to allow things like ViewCVS links to be added to the display
1736 (although it is not yet clear how this argument should be used: the
1737 interface remains subject to change untill it has been documented).
1739 *** display ShellCommand logs with HTML
1741 Headers are in blue, stderr is in red (unless usePTY=1 in which case stderr
1742 and stdout are indistinguishable). A link is provided which returns the same
1743 contents as plain text (by appending "?text=1" to the URL).
1745 *** buildslaves send real tracebacks upon error
1747 The .unsafeTracebacks option has been turned on for the buildslaves,
1748 allowing them to send a full stack trace when an exception occurs, which is
1749 logged in the buildmaster's twistd.log file. This makes it much easier to
1750 determine what went wrong on the slave side.
1752 *** BasicBuildFactory refactored
1754 The BasicBuildFactory class was refactored to make it easier to create
1755 derivative classes, in particular the BasicSVN variant.
1757 *** "ping buildslave" web button added
1759 There is now a button on the "builder information" page that lets a web user
1760 initiate a ping of the corresponding build slave (right next to the button
1761 that lets them force a build). This was added to help track down a problem
1762 with the slave keepalives.
1766 You can now have multiple BuildSteps with the same name (the names are used
1767 as hash keys in the data structure that helps determine ETA values for each
1768 step, the new code creates unique key names if necessary to avoid
1769 collisions). This means that, for example, you do not have to create a
1770 BuildStep subclass just to have two Compile steps in the same process.
1772 If CVSToys is not installed, the tests that depend upon it are skipped.
1774 Some tests in 0.4.2 failed because of a missing set of test files, they are
1775 now included in the tarball properly.
1777 Slave keepalives should work better now in the face of silent connection
1778 loss (such as when an intervening NAT box times out the association), the
1779 connection should be reestablished in minutes instead of hours.
1781 Shell commands on the slave are invoked with an argument list instead of the
1782 ugly and error-prone split-on-spaces approach. If the ShellCommand is given
1783 a string (instead of a list), it will fall back to splitting on spaces.
1784 Shell commands should work on win32 now (using COMSPEC instead of /bin/sh).
1786 Buildslaves under w32 should theoretically work now, and one was running for
1787 the Twisted buildbot for a while until the machine had to be returned.
1789 The "header" lines in ShellCommand logs (which include the first line, that
1790 displays the command being run, and the last, which shows its exit status)
1791 are now generated by the buildslave side instead of the local (buildmaster)
1792 side. This can provide better error handling and is generally cleaner.
1793 However, if you have an old buildslave (running 0.4.2 or earlier) and a new
1794 buildmaster, then neither end will generate these header lines.
1796 CVSCommand was improved, in certain situations 0.4.2 would perform
1797 unnecessary checkouts (when an update would have sufficed). Thanks to Johan
1798 Dahlin for the patches. The status output was fixed as well, so that
1799 failures in CVS and SVN commands (such as not being able to find the 'svn'
1800 executable) make the step status box red.
1802 Subversion support was refactored to make it behave more like CVS. This is a
1803 work in progress and will be improved in the next release.
1806 * Release 0.4.2 (08 Jan 2004)
1808 ** test suite updated
1810 The test suite has been completely moved over to Twisted's "Trial"
1811 framework, and all tests now pass. To run the test suite (consisting of 64
1812 tests, probably covering about 30% of BuildBot's logic), do this:
1814 PYTHONPATH=. trial -v buildbot.test
1816 ** Mail parsers updated
1818 Several bugs in the mail-parsing code were fixed, allowing a buildmaster to
1819 be triggered by mail sent out by a CVS repository. (The Twisted Buildbot is
1820 now using this to trigger builds, as their CVS server machine is having some
1821 difficulties with FreshCVS). The FreshCVS mail format for directory
1822 additions appears to have changed recently: the new parser should handle
1823 both old and new-style messages.
1825 A parser for Bonsai commit messages (buildbot.changes.mail.parseBonsaiMail)
1826 was contributed by Stephen Davis. Thanks Stephen!
1828 ** CVS "global options" now available
1830 The CVS build step can now accept a list of "global options" to give to the
1831 cvs command. These go before the "update"/"checkout" word, and are described
1832 fully by "cvs --help-options". Two useful ones might be "-r", which causes
1833 checked-out files to be read-only, and "-R", which assumes the repository is
1834 read-only (perhaps by not attempting to write to lock files).
1837 * Release 0.4.1 (09 Dec 2003)
1839 ** MaildirSources fixed
1841 Several bugs in MaildirSource made them unusable. These have been fixed (for
1842 real this time). The Twisted buildbot is using an FCMaildirSource while they
1843 fix some FreshCVS daemon problems, which provided the encouragement for
1844 getting these bugs fixed.
1846 In addition, the use of DNotify (only available under linux) was somehow
1847 broken, possibly by changes in some recent version of Python. It appears to
1848 be working again now (against both python-2.3.3c1 and python-2.2.1).
1850 ** master.cfg can use 'basedir' variable
1852 As documented in the sample configuration file (but not actually implemented
1853 until now), a variable named 'basedir' is inserted into the namespace used
1854 by master.cfg . This can be used with something like:
1856 os.path.join(basedir, "maildir")
1858 to obtain a master-basedir-relative location.
1861 * Release 0.4.0 (05 Dec 2003)
1865 I've moved the codebase to Twisted's new 'application' framework, which
1866 drastically cleans up service startup/shutdown just like newcred did for
1867 authorization. This is mostly an internal change, but the interface to
1868 IChangeSources was modified, so in the off chance that someone has written a
1869 custom change source, it may have to be updated to the new scheme.
1871 The most user-visible consequence of this change is that now both
1872 buildmasters and buildslaves are generated with the standard Twisted 'mktap'
1873 utility. Basic documentation is in the README file.
1875 Both buildmaster and buildslave .tap files need to be re-generated to run
1876 under the new code. I have not figured out the styles.Versioned upgrade path
1877 well enough to avoid this yet. Sorry.
1879 This also means that both buildslaves and the buildmaster require
1880 Twisted-1.1.0 or later.
1882 ** reloadable master.cfg
1884 Most aspects of a buildmaster is now controlled by a configuration file
1885 which can be re-read at runtime without losing build history. This feature
1886 makes the buildmaster *much* easier to maintain.
1888 In the previous release, you would create the buildmaster by writing a
1889 program to define the Builders and ChangeSources and such, then run it to
1890 create the .tap file. In the new release, you use 'mktap' to create the .tap
1891 file, and the only parameter you give it is the base directory to use. Each
1892 time the buildmaster starts, it will look for a file named 'master.cfg' in
1893 that directory and parse it as a python script. That script must define a
1894 dictionary named 'BuildmasterConfig' with various keys to define the
1895 builders, the known slaves, what port to use for the web server, what IRC
1896 channels to connect to, etc.
1898 This config file can be re-read at runtime, and the buildmaster will compute
1899 the differences and add/remove services as necessary. The re-reading is
1900 currently triggered through the debug port (contrib/debugclient.py is the
1901 debug port client), but future releases will add the ability to trigger the
1902 reconfiguration by IRC command, web page button, and probably a local UNIX
1903 socket (with a helper script to trigger a rebuild locally).
1905 docs/examples/twisted_master.cfg contains a sample configuration file, which
1906 also lists all the keys that can be set.
1908 There may be some bugs lurking, such as re-configuring the buildmaster while
1909 a build is running. It needs more testing.
1913 Radix contributed some support scripts to run MaxQ test scripts. MaxQ
1914 (http://maxq.tigris.org/) is a web testing tool that allows you to record
1915 HTTP sessions and play them back.
1917 ** Builders can now wait on multiple Interlocks
1919 The "Interlock" code has been enhanced to allow multiple builders to wait on
1920 each one. This was done to support the new config-file syntax for specifying
1921 Interlocks (in which each interlock is a tuple of A and [B], where A is the
1922 builder the Interlock depends upon, and [B] is a list of builders that
1923 depend upon the Interlock).
1925 "Interlock" is misnamed. In the next release it will be changed to
1926 "Dependency", because that's what it really expresses. A new class (probably
1927 called Interlock) will be created to express the notion that two builders
1928 should not run at the same time, useful when multiple builders are run on
1929 the same machine and thrashing results when several CPU- or disk- intensive
1930 compiles are done simultaneously.
1932 ** FreshCVSSource can now handle newcred-enabled FreshCVS daemons
1934 There are now two FreshCVSSource classes: FreshCVSSourceNewcred talks to
1935 newcred daemons, and FreshCVSSourceOldcred talks to oldcred ones. Mind you,
1936 FreshCVS doesn't yet do newcred, but when it does, we'll be ready.
1938 'FreshCVSSource' maps to the oldcred form for now. That will probably change
1939 when the current release of CVSToys supports newcred by default.
1941 ** usePTY=1 on posix buildslaves
1943 When a buildslave is running under POSIX (i.e. pretty much everything except
1944 windows), child processes are created with a pty instead of separate
1945 stdin/stdout/stderr pipes. This makes it more likely that a hanging build
1946 (when killed off by the timeout code) will have all its sub-childred cleaned
1947 up. Non-pty children would tend to leave subprocesses running because the
1948 buildslave was only able to kill off the top-level process (typically
1951 Windows doesn't have any concept of ptys, so non-posix systems do not try to
1954 ** mail parsers should actually work now
1956 The email parsing functions (FCMaildirSource and SyncmailMaildirSource) were
1957 broken because of my confused understanding of how python class methods
1958 work. These sources should be functional now.
1960 ** more irc bot sillyness
1962 The IRC bot can now perform half of the famous AYBABTO scene.
1965 * Release 0.3.5 (19 Sep 2003)
1969 Buildbot has moved to "newcred", a new authorization framework provided by
1970 Twisted, which is a good bit cleaner and easier to work with than the
1971 "oldcred" scheme in older versions. This causes both buildmaster and
1972 buildslaves to depend upon Twisted 1.0.7 or later. The interface to
1973 'makeApp' has changed somewhat (the multiple kinds of remote connections all
1974 use the same TCP port now).
1976 Old buildslaves will get "_PortalWrapper instance has no attribute
1977 'remote_username'" errors when they try to connect. They must be upgraded.
1979 The FreshCVSSource uses PB to connect to the CVSToys server. This has been
1980 upgraded to use newcred too. If you get errors (TODO: what do they look
1981 like?) in the log when the buildmaster tries to connect, you need to upgrade
1982 your FreshCVS service or use the 'useOldcred' argument when creating your
1983 FreshCVSSource. This is a temporary hack to allow the buildmaster to talk to
1984 oldcred CVSToys servers. Using it will trigger deprecation warnings. It will
1987 In conjunction with this change, makeApp() now accepts a password which can
1988 be applied to the debug service.
1992 *** "copydir" for CVS checkouts
1994 The CVS build step can now accept a "copydir" parameter, which should be a
1995 directory name like "source" or "orig". If provided, the CVS checkout is
1996 done once into this directory, then copied into the actual working directory
1997 for compilation etc. Later updates are done in place in the copydir, then
1998 the workdir is replaced with a copy.
2000 This reduces CVS bandwidth (update instead of full checkout) at the expense
2001 of twice the disk space (two copies of the tree).
2003 *** Subversion (SVN) support
2005 Radix (Christopher Armstrong) contributed early support for building
2006 Subversion-based trees. The new 'SVN' buildstep behaves roughly like the
2007 'CVS' buildstep, and the contrib/svn_buildbot.py script can be used as a
2008 checkin trigger to feed changes to a running buildmaster.
2012 *** .tap file generation
2014 We no longer set the .tap filename, because the buildmaster/buildslave
2015 service might be added to an existing .tap file and we shouldn't presume to
2016 own the whole thing. You may want to manually rename the "buildbot.tap" file
2017 to something more meaningful (like "buildslave-bot1.tap").
2021 If the IRC server goes away (it was restarted, or the network connection was
2022 lost), the buildmaster will now schedule a reconnect attempt.
2024 *** w32 buildslave fixes
2026 An "rm -rf" was turned into shutil.rmtree on non-posix systems.
2029 * Release 0.3.4 (28 Jul 2003)
2033 The buildmaster can now join a set of IRC channels and respond to simple
2034 queries about builder status.
2036 ** slave information
2038 The build slaves can now report information from a set of info/* files in
2039 the slave base directory to the buildmaster. This will be used by the slave
2040 administrator to announce details about the system hosting the slave,
2041 contact information, etc. For now, info/admin should contain the name/email
2042 of the person who is responsible for the buildslave, and info/host should
2043 describe the system hosting the build slave (OS version, CPU speed, memory,
2044 etc). The contents of these files are made available through the waterfall
2047 ** change notification email parsers
2049 A parser for Syncmail (syncmail.sourceforge.net) was added. SourceForge
2050 provides examples of setting up syncmail to deliver CVS commit messages to
2051 mailing lists, so hopefully this will make it easier for sourceforge-hosted
2052 projects to set up a buildbot.
2054 email processors were moved into buildbot.changes.mail . FCMaildirSource was
2055 moved, and the compatibility location (buildbot.changes.freshcvsmail) will
2056 go away in the next release.
2058 ** w32 buildslave ought to work
2060 Some non-portable code was changed to make it more likely that the
2061 buildslave will run under windows. The Twisted buildbot now has a
2062 (more-or-less) working w32 buildslave.
2065 * Release 0.3.3 (21 May 2003):
2067 ** packaging changes
2069 *** include doc/examples in the release. Oops again.
2073 *** add keepalives to deal with NAT boxes
2075 Some NAT boxes drop port mappings if the TCP connection looks idle for too
2076 long (maybe 30 minutes?). Add application-level keepalives (dummy commands
2077 sent from slave to master every 10 minutes) to appease the NAT box and keep
2078 our connection alive. Enable this with --keepalive in the slave mktap
2079 command line. Check the README for more details.
2083 *** allow slaves to trigger any build that they host
2085 Added an internal function to ask the buildmaster to start one of their
2086 builds. Must be triggered with a debugger or manhole on the slave side for
2087 now, will add a better UI later.
2089 *** allow web page viewers to trigger any build
2091 Added a button to the per-build page (linked by the build names on the third
2092 row of the waterfall page) to allow viewers to manually trigger builds.
2093 There is a field for them to indicate who they are and why they are
2094 triggering the build. It is possible to abuse this, but for now the benefits
2095 outweigh the damage that could be done (worst case, someone can make your
2096 machine run builds continuously).
2098 ** generic buildprocess changes
2100 *** don't queue multiple builds for offline slaves
2102 If a slave is not online when a build is ready to run, that build is queued
2103 so the slave will run it when it next connects. However, the buildmaster
2104 used to queue every such build, so the poor slave machine would be subject
2105 to tens or hundreds of builds in a row when they finally did come online.
2106 The buildmaster has been changed to merge these multiple builds into a
2109 *** bump ShellCommand default timeout to 20 minutes
2111 Used for testing out the win32 twisted builder. I will probably revert this
2114 *** split args in ShellCommand ourselves instead of using /bin/sh
2116 This should remove the need for /bin/sh on the slave side, improving the
2117 chances that the buildslave can run on win32.
2119 *** add configureEnv argument to Configure step, pass env dict to slave
2121 Allows build processes to do things like 'CFLAGS=-O0 ./configure' without
2122 using /bin/sh to set the environment variable
2124 ** Twisted buildprocess changes
2126 *** warn instead of flunk the build when cReactor or qtreactor tests fail
2128 These two always fail. For now, downgrade those failures to a warning
2129 (orange box instead of red).
2131 *** don't use 'clobber' on remote builds
2133 Builds that run on remote machines (freebsd, OS-X) now use 'cvs update'
2134 instead of clobbering their trees and doing a fresh checkout. The multiple
2135 simultaneous CVS checkouts were causing a strain on Glyph's upstream
2138 *** use trial --testmodule instead of our own test-case-name grepper
2140 The Twisted coding/testing convention has developers put 'test-case-name'
2141 tags (emacs local variables, actually) in source files to indicate which
2142 test cases should be run to exercise that code. Twisted's unit-test
2143 framework just acquired an argument to look for these tags itself. Use that
2144 instead of the extra FindUnitTestsForFiles build step we were doing before.
2145 Removes a good bit of code from buildbot and into Twisted where it really
2149 * Release 0.3.2 (07 May 2003):
2151 ** packaging changes
2153 *** fix major packaging bug: none of the buildbot/* subdirectories were
2154 included in the 0.3.1 release. Sorry, I'm still figuring out distutils
2159 *** use pb.Cacheable to update Events in remote status client. much cleaner.
2161 *** start to clean up BuildProcess->status.builder interface
2165 *** waterfall display was missing a <tr>, causing it to be misrendered in most
2166 browsers (except the one I was testing it with, of course)
2168 *** URL without trailing slash (when served in a twisted-web distributed
2169 server, with a url like "http://twistedmatrix.com/~warner.twistd") should do
2170 redirect to URL-with-trailing-slash, otherwise internal hrefs are broken.
2172 *** remote status clients: forget RemoteReferences at shutdown, removes
2173 warnings about "persisting Ephemerals"
2175 ** Twisted buildprocess updates:
2177 *** match build process as of twisted-1.0.5
2178 **** use python2.2 everywhere now that twisted rejects python2.1
2179 **** look for test-result constants in multiple places
2180 *** move experimental 'trial --jelly' code to separate module
2181 *** add FreeBSD builder
2182 *** catch rc!=0 in HLint step
2183 *** remove RunUnitTestsRandomly, use randomly=1 parameter instead
2184 *** parameterize ['twisted.test'] default test case to make subclassing easier
2185 *** ignore internal distutils warnings in python2.3 builder
2188 * Release 0.3.1 (29 Apr 2003):
2192 ** Features implemented:
2194 change notification from FreshCVS server or parsed maildir contents
2198 basic builds, configure/compile/test
2200 some Twisted-specific build steps: docs, unit tests, debuild
2202 status reporting via web page
2204 ** Features still experimental/unpolished
2206 status reporting via PB client