[Buildbot-devel] adding build steps on the fly

[Aaron Maxwell]

On Thursday 31 July 2008 02:18:04 am Brian Gerkey wrote:
> hi,
>
> Is it possible to add a build step on the fly, during a build?

I faced this problem last year with 0.7.6.  As far as I could tell, the set of 
build steps for a factory instance is in effect immutable, unfortunately.  I 
was able to solved the problem anyway though.  The solution I came up with 
was to generate all possible factories at start up time.  (In effect, all 
possible sets of build steps).  Then I would dynamically select the 
appropriate factory depending on what kind of build was being run.  

I accomplished this dynamism by subclassing 
buildbot.process.factory.BuildFactory, and directing my set up to use this 
subclass.  I overrode BuildFactory.newBuild to set self.steps appropriately 
before invoking the parent method.  Also, it's important to set the class 
attribute useProgress to False in your BuildFactory subclass - BB's progress 
estimation algorithm assumes the sequence of steps is very static, with fatal 
reactions if it changes.  (At least in 0.7.6).

Perhaps someone knows of a better way to handle this.  It's a lot of work, so 
I'd recommend another approach if you can find one.  In your situation, it 
may be a possible to squeeze the set of new steps in a single build step, 
containing a script that checks whether it needs to run, and prematurely 
exits if not. 

Another approach may be to have the step that processes a list of changed 
files set a custom build property depending on the result, and having these 
later steps only execute if this property is set to true (etc.)

Good luck
Aaron

>
> In particular, when a build is triggered, I want to process the list
> of changed files and potentially add new steps as a result of
> processing.
>
> I've tried a variety of things, such as writing my own class that
> inherits from a subclass of BuildStep, then mucking with
> self.build.steps in there, but so far to no avail.
>
> 	thanks,
> 	brian.
>
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-- 
Aaron Maxwell
http://redsymbol.net