User:Rhelmer:Migrating Tinderbox to Buildbot

Shorter term

Use existing release automation

Short-term it's probably fastest and safest to keep Tinderbox server in place, with Buildbot reporting to it, until we get the Buildbot/Tinderbox server parity issues figured out.

On the client side, we have been working on automating the release process using Bootstrap driven by Buildbot; making this system work for Nightly(Clobber) and Depend builds should be fairly trivial.

Bootstrap's "Build" and "Repack" (l10n) steps currently just call into Tinderbox client, but we mitigate a lot of Tinderbox's problems. We should eventually take it out, but it will be much easier when it's encapsulated into these "steps" instead of our current situation (Tinderbox does everything).

Replace what we have, get the following "for free":

• only build on checkin for Depend
• produce full l10n set with nightly
• better logging/error checking

What we need to get there:

1. buildbot master set up
2. buildbot slaves on Mozilla1.8 and Firefox tinderboxes
3. nightly timer scheduler
4. bonsai change scheduler

Depend build scheduler does:

• Build

Nightly build scheduler does:

• Build
• Repack
• Update

We need #1 and #2 done for release automation anyway, #3 and #4 are trivial.

Longer Term

Drive build system from Buildbot

Long-term we can have Buildbot drive the process at a lower level.

The process could be something like:

4 builders total:

• Source (checks out using timestamp, creates tarball)
• (Linux/Mac/Windows)-(Clobber/Depend)

Clobber builds are triggered by the nightly scheduler (or manually) and do the following:

1. Source builder creates and uploads source tarball
2. (Linux/Mac/Windows)-Clobber builders
   1. download source, unpack
   2. configure
   3. make package
   4. upload package
   5. build symbols
   6. upload symbols
   7. create full MAR
   8. upload full MAR

Depend builds are triggered by checkins (e.g. using BonsaiPoller) (or manually) and do the following;

1. (Linux/Mac/Windows)-Depend builders
   1. update existing source checkout (using client.mk)
   2. configure
   3. make package
   4. upload package

Need the following to have this well-supported in buildbot:

• Source() class for client.mk-style scripted checkouts
• some way to do clobber/depend in the same builder - perhaps a custom BuildFactory