[Buildbot-devel] Project dependencies, building branches, etc

[Nick Trout]

> Another approach would be to modify BuildBot itself to have a
notification
> when any build finishes; this could then be used to report to another
> instace, which would let its Builders decide which, if any, projects
> should be rebuilt.

There is no way to communicate (at least not through the default master
config) between masters that I know of. You can however, use interlocks
to kick off sequential slaves, so depending on how you think about it
you could set off multiple projects with the same source tree. 

> Dependencies. When we commit to our utility library A, we want our
project
> B
> to be updated to use it. Some projects are tightly integrated and
should
> be
> tested in concert this way.

Could you check it into version control, which would force a get on
another master?

> 1) Allow more than one project in a single Master. Support this by
adding
> a
> key to each ChangeSource, and letting each Builder define a list of
> relevant
> keys. Once this is done, it would be straightforward to modify the
> waterfall
> display to take a list of builders to display. This would allow for
> customized views.

Is this a coincidence or did you read my post?! :-) (i.e. source keys
and filtering)

> 3) Add a post-build hook to the master so that dependents could be
> notified
> of a build. Alternatively, I could just subclass BuildMaster.

I think you've pointed out an option that I missed, master build steps.
Looking at buildbot.process.step there is a Dummy step:

"""I am a dummy no-op step, which runs entirely on the master, and
simply
    waits 5 seconds before finishing with SUCCESS
    """

this could be modified to allow build steps (e.g. just calling a
function in the master.cfg) to allow source filtering etc. If this step
had access to the change list (and perhaps other features) it could
determine how the build proceeded. This might be useful for your project
dependency checking. A problem might be that the build factory has to
create build in order for this step to run (only to be aborted if we
decided that the filtered changes, or dependencies are not ones you
want).


Nick