[Buildbot-devel] Various BuildBot questions

[Brian Warner]

> Is there any way to disable forcing a build?  For a publicly-reachable bot, 
> I'd like to avoid making that feature widely available, possibly allowing it 
> to only be available via the debug client.

For now, edit buildbot.status.html.StatusResourceBuilder.getChild to get rid
of the 'if path == "force"' test. You'll also want to comment out the part in
.body which appends the "force build" HTML to the per-builder page.

Eventually I plan to have an admin page of some sort, so it should be
possible to only have some actions be accessible from it. I'll also look into
putting a flag on the per-Builder config file that lets you enable/disable
the world-accessible Force-Build button.

> Is there any way to push results instead of requiring polling? I'm
> especially interested in sending emails to the guilty, but general
> notifications to an IRC channel might be nice ("build FooBar broke"),
> especially when there are failures.

Very soon. There is code in CVS now to send mail to a fixed list of
recipients (although you can configure it to only send the mail when the
build has started failing, i.e. when build[n] fails and build[n-1] was
successful). I also expect to improve the IRC client to add a "noisy" or
"announce" mode, where notices like this are sent spontaneously to the
channel.

The blame part (contacting just the guilty party) is getting closer but I
don't plan to wait for it before making the next release. I'm still trying to
draw up a clean design for it.

> Are there any plans to make the HTML more template-based?

I haven't looked into that, but I'd welcome patches :). I heard that somebody
had done some CSS-ification work, but didn't sound like they were able to
make it public. Web stuff isn't my strength.. hopefully someone else who
knows Woven or Nevow or something will get interested in this one.

cheers,
 -Brian