[Buildbot-devel] build stops

[Brian Warner]

> is it possible with buildbot to manually interrupt a build as to a) stop 
> it completely or b) just pause it to continue later ?

Only the former. There is a "Stop This Build" button on the per-Build web
page, as well as an IRC command to interrupt the build. Both options stop the
build completely.

> if at all, then probably only buildstep-wise and not inside a current 
> buildstep, so that the running step when the interrupt was sent would 
> have to be repeated, am i right?

Once upon a time, there was the hope that BuildSteps cold be interrupted and
then resumed or re-run as necessary (a simple "make" could be run a second
time, but if the build were stopped in the middle of, say, a CVS checkout,
then you'd probably have to re-do the whole build, since the tree might have
been left in some weird state). The main use case for this was for when
buildslaves lose contact with the buildmaster for a little while, but not
forever.. the hope was that transient network problems shouldn't kill off a
build that takes an hour to re-run.

However, the code for this was never completed, so I kind of gave up on the
idea. There are still some lingering remnants of this idea in the codebase
(in particular the way that status messages are sent from the slave to the
master: each with a number, and queued until the master acknowledges receipt.
But in general we don't have a clean way to resume builds that have been
interrupted.

If the build contains a number of relatively short steps, then it might be
feasible to pause one by waiting until the current step has finished, then
just not running the next step until later. Does this seem useful?

 -Brian