[Buildbot-devel] copying information between steps or schedulers

[Stefan Seefeld]

A.T.Hofkamp wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I am busy convincing buildbot to build, install, and test our code and 
> have a few challenges.....
> 
> The basic sequence is
> 1. From the SVN repository, build a number of tar.gz-files
> 2. Install these tar.gz files at 3 different slaves
> 3. Test the installed version
> 
> And the challenges I currently see:
> 
> ad 1: 'svn update' is easy, but the repository revision is used as 
> suffix in the name of the .tar.gz files in the following builds. I dont' 
> see a way to forward such information between build-steps currently.

svn itself can tell you anything you want to know about the current
working copy. Your build system should be able to call that to compute
package names.

> ad 2: The best approach seems to have 1. as a seperate schedule, and 
> have 3 downstream schedulers for 2., one for each slave.

buildbot can call 'svn update' with a specific revision number. While
I can see some advantages in sharing a single source tree among multiple
build trees, this is not strictly required.
So, you could work with a single scheduler and let each slave do a separate
update / build / package.

> The names of the tar.gz files (or the repository revision alone would be 
> sufficient) need to be transported between the upstream scheduler and 
> the downstream schedulers/slaves. No idea how to do that.

I agree about the need for a facility to let schedulers (and associated
builders) share data. Right now I'm working around that by letting
upstream builders put all the info I need into a file that the downstream
builders will read. Obviously, that requires some communication mechanism
outside the buildbot (such as NFS or scp).
It would be great if a solution for that could be offered inside the
buildbot framework.

Regards,
		Stefan