Helping CollabNet provide an automated build farm for Subversion.

Just to let you all know: I'm working with CollabNet's operations team
to set up a small build/test farm for Subversion. Erik Hülsmann first
proposed this idea privately at EuroOSCON in Amsterdam, and when we
took it to CollabNet they were in favor right away.

The goal is to have stable, consistent environments for verifying that
releases (and bindings) work on certain platforms. Right now we've
got a box each allocated for Linux (probably RHEL4 or FC4) and Windows
XP; next in line are Solaris 10 and Mac OS X, but we'd like to get the
Linux and Windows instances up and running first.

WHAT YOU CAN DO TO HELP:

These boxes will be managed by CollabNet's operations team, but
they'll be configured according a specification that the Subversion
project writes. I'll be starting that specification in our www/ area;
anyone who has experience with such systems, please help out. The
better our spec, the more easily (== the more quickly) CollabNet can
set up the farm.

Erik Hülsmann, Sander Striker and I discussed various build/test
systems in Amsterdam, and came up with this short list of candidates
(Erik, Sander, did I leave out anything major?):

   * BuildBot
       https://sourceforge.net/projects/buildbot/
       http://buildbot.sourceforge.net/manual-0.7.0.html

   * GUMP
       http://gump.apache.org/

   * Tinderbox
       http://www.mozilla.org/tinderbox.html

If you have experience with any of these, or if you favor another
system, please follow up.

ABOUT TESTING UNCOMITTED CHANGES:

These boxes will not only be for testing trunk and release tags, but
for testing uncommitted changes -- say, changes that fix the bindings
on Windows when they're broken and those who have the expertise to fix
them don't have access to a Windows box (to pick a totally random
example, ahem).

Even though we won't have login access to these boxes, at least one
system, BuildBot, has a feature that allows a client instance to do a
patched build, see

   http://buildbot.sourceforge.net/manual-0.7.0.html#try

(Thanks to Erik for digging that up.)

Because of this feature, and because of BuildBot's documentation and
portability (see http://buildbot.videolan.org/), I'm leaning toward
BuildBot right now. However, real-world experience is the best data,
so if anyone here has any, this is the time to speak up.

Thanks,
-Karl

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