[Python-Dev] Possible language summit topic: buildbots (original) (raw)

Zooko O'Whielacronx zookog at gmail.com
Tue Oct 27 16:41:42 CET 2009

Right, how do developers benefit from a buildbot?

From my experience (five large buildbots with many developers plus two with only a couple of developers), a buildbot does little good unless the tests are reliable and not too noisy. "Reliable" is best achieved by having tests be deterministic and reproducible. "Not too noisy" means that the builders are all green all the time (at least for a "supported" subset of the buildslaves).

Beyond that, then I think there has to be a culture change where the development team decides that it is really, really not okay to leave a builder red after you turned it red, and that instead you need to revert the patch that made it go from green to red before you do anything else. It has taken me a long time to acculturate to that and I wouldn't expect most people to do it quickly or easily.

(It is interesting to think of what would happen if that policy were automated -- any patch which caused any "supported" builder to go from green to red would be automatically be reverted.)

Also, of course, this is mostly meaningless unless the code that is being changed by the patches is well-covered by tests.

Regards,

Zooko

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