[Buildbot-devel] change source tracking CVS tags

[Bailey, Darragh]

I've been looking at the various solutions for tracking changes to CVS, mostly at the ones that are supported by Buildbot.

Now I have various problems with most of them, in one form or another, the main one being that the system with the CVS repository doesn't support anything after python 1.5 and its proving impossible to get python 2.3 compiled on it. So any of the tools for hooking into CVS to track changes which are recently written in python don't work. (FreshCVS, syncmail &  CVSCommit)

However the main problem is not how they work, but the information they provide, and therefore can feed into the change sources monitored by buildbot.

My problem is in two parts, first in capturing all the required information from changes to CVS, and second in having this information picked up by buildbot.

The builds are controlled both by the branch they are on and a build tag. However the loginfo hook in CVS doesn't appear to be able to provide information on the movement of tags, only branch information where files were committed to a branch.

The solution appears to be to use taginfo, which is fine, except for the lack of scripts out already written :(.


This appears to have lead to the situation that buildbot doesn't appear to have anything written that handles changes to tags, coming from a CVS source at least, not sure about the other source code repositories.


At the moment I'm looking at the task of trying to write some scripts (probably in perl) for cvs to be called from commitinfo, taginfo & loginfo, and additional classes/methods for buildbot to handle the additional tag information.

There are a lot of questions left about how to detect that a tag commit was abandoned or failed to apply since taginfo is called prior to the application of the tags, not before. Which means that there is nothing in CVS that reports on the results of applying tags to files.

Rather than going off and starting to write all of this code, I'm hoping that someone has encountered this problem before, or even part of it and has an alternative idea.


--
Regards,
Darragh Bailey

Systems Software Engineer
Hewlett Packard Galway Ltd.
+353 91 75-4674

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