When I upgrade a buildbot master do I have to upgrade all the slaves?

Question

I want to use the gitpoller in buildbot however I don't want to upgrade all the slaves.

Can I get away with upgrading the master to 0.8.3 leave the slaves on 0.7.x?

Answer 1

Buildbot has fairly good backwards and forwards compatibility between server and slave version. We try to keep backwards compatibility at least back to 0.7.12 (although we don't have tests set up to guarantee this). I suspect even older version will mostly just work, even with version 0.8.5, which is the most recent version.

To give you an idea on the rate of change, there have been about 330 changes to the slave and 2000 changes to the slave, since the code was split (sometime between 0.7.12 and 0.8.0).

One benefit to newer slaves, is that a bunch of commands have been added to the slave to allow a lot of the logic (particularly of source steps) to be moved to the master.

If you are upgrading, I'd suggest using 0.8.5 (with 1fed964da6b1c15e409dacb6ce0c9585e3669f3c if you use irc force builds).