Having a buildbot that regularly checks all your builds is handy. You'll forget to update your tests when making a change; you'll make a change and forget that it breaks functionality elsewhere; you release a new version of an internal package and you forget that something else needs the now-removed function call. A buildbot will tell you.
Or rather, I'll tell my colleagues until I've figured out how to get buildbot to mail. The config is there, but the mails not.
That's the only problem however. Setting up a buildbot used to take loads of effort resulting in fragile setups that languished after just a few weeks of use, normally. Now there's the collective.buildbot buildout recipe. Just follow the instructions and the recipe will take care of the hard work for you. I'd say the handiest way is to create a virtualenv and to follow the instructions in the "quick start" section. Once you've got something working you can copy/paste the necessary bits to a fresh buildout of your own making.
The health agency now has a running buildbot. We feel that's a whole new level of reliability and ease-of-mind. Recommended!
My name is Reinout van Rees and I work a lot with Python (programming language) and Django (website framework). I live in The Netherlands and I'm happily married to Annie van Rees-Kooiman.
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