As I mentioned previously, I've been working on incrementally moving our Tinderbox client installs over to Buildbot.
The first step is to switch from driving Tinderbox from Buildbot and our release automation system, instead of being driven on each machine from the multi-tinderbox script. The release automation still calls Tinderbox client underneath, so features like CLOBBER support and all of your other favorites remain.
I have the staging automation builders publishing to the Tinderbox MozillaStage tree. Note that it's using Mozilla1.8 builders but firing off builds when it sees trunk checkins; this is because I want to make sure the Bonsai polling is working and Mozilla1.8 doesn't get very many checkins :) Also, I'm trying to stay out of the way of the ongoing trunk automation work that bhearsum is driving (AKA, letting him find and fix the trunk+release_automation bugs before I add nightly support). Expect to see trunk nightlies up there in the next few weeks.
This has several advantages right off the bat:
- same release process we use for production (currently a very small subset
- only build on checkin, should help cycle times
- same builders used for nightly and production releases (admittedly, this is how it used to be before release automation; but now we can let Buildbot handle the queuing instead of either interrupting depend/nightly builds or running multiple builds on the same machine, which is slow)
As we continue to make the nightly and final release process more alike, we can start taking advantage of things like that only final releases have but are missing on nightlies:
- updates for l10n (only en-US gets updates currently :( )
- update verification
- publishing the source tarball used to buld
- using the same timestamp for all platforms
On the administration side, it should let us manage builders centrally, more quickly and easily deploy new builders, and with a little more work will let us parallelize builds (multiple build machines per column, or buildslaves per builder in Buildbot parlance), which should further help cycle time (no having to wait for the current build to finish to get a build started with your fresh checkin).
Comments/questions/concerns welcome! Feel free to email me, the build group, or post in mozilla.dev.builds newsgroup if you'd like to discuss further.