Dev:Doc/Process/Buildbot Experimental

Experimental builds with BuildBot

Making a test build of some new feature is a must have to get some real testing of it - however, it’s now really hard to create yourself static builds of Blender that will run on every system (even worse if you have to consider the five OS types supported!).

To address that, we have a specific process that allows building experimental features with the buildbot.

Specific Git Branch

To avoid things getting totally out of control, our buildbot can only build a few specific branches from our Git repository. The one dedicated to test builds is named… experimental-build. So you first need to merge your patch into this branch, following that process:

1. Checkout experimental-build branch.
2. Merge master in it.
3. Squash-merge your work (if using a git branch), or apply your patch, and commit.
4. **Revert HEAD**. This will revert experimental-build to master state.
5. Push all that to remote repository.

Remember that you should always keep HEAD of experimental-build branch in exact same state as master.

Experimental Build

Once you have pushed your changes in experimental-build branch, note the hash of interest (usually HEAD^), and open needed builders pages from there (see that page for details). Then, for each selected builder, at the bottom of its page:

1. You may enter your (nick)name and reason of the build (nice for logs).
2. Select experimental-build branch.
3. Enter the hash of the commit you want to build in Revision field.
4. Hit Force Build and wait for the build completion.

Assuming your builds were successful, you’ll find them here. Do not share this link with users! The builds here will get replaced as soon as someone else does another experimental build, so you have to download them yourself as soon as possible, and then publish them (you can use graphicall.org, or some file-sharing web service, whatever).

The important point here is that those builds are under your responsibility, exactly as if you had made them on your own computer.