Buildbot and Git Repositories
In a recent conversation with the GitHub guys, I was talking about how my buildbot setup was hitting GitHub and how a recent filesystem glitch of theirs caused my screen to turn red with growl alerts from buildwatch.
The response was a tongue-in-cheek “I refuse to apologize.”
The thing is, that response is absolutely the right one. This is distributed revision control. Why did I have a screen full of growl alerts because of a failure of a filesystem completely unrelated to what I was doing?
I was relying on GitHub to be highly and quickly available to my seventeen (and growing in number) buildbot slaves for this project.
Most of the time, there’s nothing for them to actually get from a centralized revision control – quite simply, they were asking for information that they had cryptographically verifiable assurance that they already had.
Today I made a small change to buildbot that prevents the slaves from ever talking to any network service to pick out a reference version in our most common use cases, thus realigning myself with the thing that initially sold me on GitHub’s service: It enhances collaboration without causing me to be dependent on the service.
For this failure, I am thankful. This new code will always be faster and more reliable for the common case even when GitHub works absolutely flawlessly.
