GSoC 2019 [Buildbot ideas]

[Mojca Miklavec]

Dear Rajdeep,

On Sat, 6 Apr 2019 at 13:33, Rajdeep Bharati wrote:
>
> I was wondering what kind of features you would like to have in the new waterfall view?

I don't remember whether I ever explicitly said I wanted some new
features there :)

Probably the only thing I really miss is the portname explicitly seen
without having to click (or mouse-over) the rectangle.

Way less important:
- in case the build failed, it would be nice to see which step (first)
failed, again without having to move the mouse around
- in case the build is still running, see which step is running (I
would also say "time since start" or "estimated time to finish", but I
don't want a ticking timebomb that keeps changing every second, so you
may safely ignore this)

Generally the old waterfall had all the necessary info displayed. The
new one is more compact (I would also say not too attractive design,
but I'm not someone to judge that as I'm not a designer), but is
basically lacking all the info. If one builds the same thing under the
same builder that might be fine, but we build something else each time
and without knowing what was built, those green and red squares are
basically useless.


Some more ideas for thinking. One of the most desperately needed
features to make buildbot views usable for anything else than "what's
currently being built" would be to sort (filter) by port name.

Now, port name is something specific to MacPorts, but we could
probably introduce filtering by any kind of keywords. We could write
to our master.cfg that we want to create a new filter with name "port"
and then each port would get a keyword matching its name. Then I could
ask buildbot to display me history of all builds of port "clang-7.0".
But then a few months later we might realize that we want to display
all the failed builds from a particular maintainer. Maintainer is
again something specific to MacPorts, but we could simply introduce a
new category "maintainer" on the fly and use the github handles as
keywords to search for, and I could ask buildbot to display me all
broken builds belonging to maintainer "mojca" without any changes in
the buildbot or the view itself, just by slight modification in
master.cfg. One year later we could add an arbitrary new category that
we have never even thought of, and be able to filter according to that
one (maybe: show me all builds of python or perl modules; show me all
builds with non-free licence; show me all builds from ports fetching
from git, ...). Those categories could potentially be nested.

Mojca