Buildbot

What do you like best?

There's a learning curve in buildbot as it's written mostly using Python over the twisted libraries. Unlike jenkins, even for a small configuration change you need to interact with the python code. The way schedulers or pollers are configured, every thing is very flexible and does not restrict you to UI.

What do you dislike?

The UI could have been more intuitive to show some extra details such as some more build related information on the builder's page itself. It's not that it requires a major change in the upstream code but getting that as a package from the buildbot team will add more confidence to it.

Another bug that I have been seeing with buildbot 2.7.0 is the reconfiguration issue. When a reconfiguration is done at the time the polling is happening in the background, the process hangs and then it keeps saying “reconfiguration is going on for xxx seconds.” The buildbot needs to be restarted then for the new changes to takr effect.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

I have been working as a DevOps engineer and maintaining the buildbot infrastructure end to end. The team that I work for deals extensively with llvm upstream code. To stay inline with the llvm community we use buildbot instead of Jenkins. This very system can be designed using jenkins as well however it will require so many different scripts and their templates to achieve what we do here using just one master configuration and defining all the builders there. We have 50000+ lines of code of our own other than the buildbot upstream code to facilitate the developers with high quality compiler builds.