[Adium-devl] Buildbot is live!

[timber at lava.net]

So I finally got a chance to set up buildbot this weekend. I'll spare  
you the boring details.

What is buildbot?

Buildbot is a "continuous integration"  program written in python.  
Basically when someone checks in, it does a build and runs the tests,  
so we can precisely identify what broke and when.

Great,  but what does that get me?

- A website with information about builds (such as a timeline of  
changes and resulting builds) at http://duck.adiumx.com:8080.
- An IRC bot, Lumberjack, for querying information about builds from IRC.
- Emails from buildbot to folks who checked in in a particular build.

I don't like the way X works. Can we change it?

Almost certainly. Quick list of things I want to change.

- Get this building on smew (the mini the project purchased 2 months  
ago). Running the (only) slave on my work mini is not a long term  
solution.
- Fix URLs sent in emails and by Lumberjack. They're missing builders/  
from the beginning of the path.
- Move website to buildbot.adiumx.com.
- Lumberjack is a bit anemic. Pump him up.
- Perhaps email devl when the tree begins to fail? That's a rather  
important event, but it could get a bit spammy. We'll have to see how  
often the tree actually breaks.

I want to do X with buildbot. Can it do that?

Maybe. Buildbot is really flexible. It's configuration file is a  
python script, and it's dead easy to create your own classes that  
modify default behaviors and add new functionality.

Sounds slick, where can I find out more?

Check the buildbot project website, http://buildbot.net


A final word of warning to those who have access on that machine:  
Please don't go messing around with anything just yet. I want to get  
some version control set up for our various files, especially the  
buildbot source tree, which I will be modifying (some parts heavily).