USERS ----- It is helpful to consider the types of users for this system and their special needs. 1) Project Managers: not very technical will be administering the project and need a GUI to help change various types of project information (treestate, message of the day, etc). They will also need summary pages which will show them the current status of all the projects which they are working on. They may occasionally "drill down" into the detailed status page but this will not be their primary view of the tinderbox system. 2) Build Administrator: A system administrator who will be in charge of setting up the build machines, configuring tinderbox and other build systems (bugzilla, cvs, bonsai, etc). A GUI would not be helpful as local customizations may require small changes to the code. Configurations need to be kept (mostly) in files which are separate from the Tinderbox source code so that they can be version controled and will not get stepped on when tinderbox is upgraded. 3) Developers: need to view the "state of development" and add notices to the notice board. Improvements needed from Tinderbox1 ----------------------------------- highly configurable design with multiple Version Control systems possible (bonsai, raw cvs, perforce, continuous, clearcase) and multiple modes of running possible (with no version control system with no builds display). clear programatic interfaces and better separation of functionality into separate modules. Modules should not have circular dependences. Care should be taken on adding 'use' statement. I worry very much about which modules depend on which other modules. It is important to consider which modules need to work in isolation and which modules need to share data. It should be possible to add hooks so that users get beeped when the next good build goes through or that trouble tickets are automatically opened when the builds fail. Greater flexibility in setting status of builds. We may need more gradations of failure then just 'busted' or 'test-failed' to distinguish the types of tests which have failed. generated html must be readable and help isolate programming errors. all programmable configuration parameters should be stored easy change and configure for novice users. make better use of the perl data structures to mirror the way we wish to use the data. This will allow easier maintainability and allow for more expansion of features. display should work on many different browsers. popup windows should not be netscape specific. Permanent data should be stored via datadumper so that the data and data structures are easy to read and debug. Currently this is a performance bottle neck with a large percentage of our cpu time during testing being spent in Data::Dumper::Dump. The perl module Storable is much faster. I wish to not add additional module requirements at this time, this will be configurable. # dprofpp says that: # %64.8 of elapsed real time which is 66.25 seconds # (out of 102.15 Seconds) # was spent in 3 calls to TinderDB::VC::apply_db_updates() # %58.0 of user time which is 11.05 seconds # (out of 19.03 User/102.15 Elapsed Seconds) # was spend in 32878 calls to Data::Dumper::_dump() # System Time was negligible at 2.49 Seconds All errors should be trapped and sent to log files. Strange program states should be explicitly checked for. Databases should update atomically, no information should be lost due to race conditions. All column modules (processmail, build, VC, Notices) should be able to be run individually. Modules should accept well defined text files as input and produce text files as output. This will greatly enhance the ability to test each module in isolation and to quickly port modules to new architectures. The source code should be able to run using the standard Perl libraries, as it can be difficult for some users to add libraries which are not included in the perl distribution onto production machines. Put CVS keywords into all the source files so that when the software is deployed, there is no doubt what version was checked out and where the files are stored in the local version control system. Pay closer attention to security. Use taint perl to ensure that harmful input does not get used in unexpected ways. Keep the flow of control clear and simple. Allow for use of any text browser which can display tables currently this is true for the browser links: http://artax.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~mikulas/links/. but not the browser lynx.