[TIP] Everybody wants a pony!

[C. Titus Brown]

Hi all,

one thing that became clear at PyCon this year is that everyone wants a
pony.  Preferably a pink pony.

(You had to be there.)

Anyway, along the lines of a pony, I am proposing to build or extend a
replacement for buildbot that will serve those of you who need a simpler
and more easily-installable continuous interation framework.  I have a
few basic ideas, but I'd love to hear what everyone else has to say.

Roughly speaking, I'd like to have pony-build do the following, relative
to buildbot:

 - "push" results from the client back to the server over an RPC
   connection, rather than have the server control the client.
   (That is, base it on a polling model rather than a remote control
   model.)

 - Be trivially installable on clients (a single "easy_install" that
   works, even for Steve Holden).

 - A separable and flexible reporting server to support RPC queries and
   programmable workflows.

 - A separable and flexible scheduling/config server to support build
   requests and request builds on specific servers.

 - "Anonymous" push of results, so that Joe Blow users can build,
   compile, test, and send the results back to the server for your
   examination, without breaking a sweat.

 - Push of metadata to the reporting server for e.g. communication of
   coverage data.

 - distutils/setuptools and configure/make support.

A lot of these ideas come from comparing DART with buildbot, and having
good (and bad) experiences with both.

We do have a prototype up and running and I'll try to get a screencast
up within a week or two.

Your thoughts welcome!

cheers,
--titus
-- 
C. Titus Brown, ctb at msu.edu