[Buildbot-devel] WebStatus -> master.cfg bridge?

[Christopher Blunck]

Hello all,

I work over on the Zenoss project and we started using Buildbot a  
couple of years ago for some informal automation.  Lately we've  
invested much more heavily and we now rely on Buildbot for a large  
portion of our build process.  We've had great success at automating a  
lot of our processes and are very happy with the value Buildbot  
provides.

I'm looking for a way to create a WebStatus -> master.cfg connection.   
Here's why I want to do such a thing...

Many of our build steps invoke shell scripts that require a SVN  
tagname as their first argument.  Those shell scripts go out and  
actually do a bunch of work for us and they can't be replaced with the  
functionality within Buildbot.  When we go from version 1.0.0 to 1.0.1  
to 1.0.2 we update a variable in our master.cfg that is passed down to  
the scripts as an argument.

It would be EXTREMELY helpful for us to be able to build a web  
interface that allows our build engineers to provide the value for  
that variable before kicking off a build.  We've modified the front- 
end to buildbot by modifying the index.html file in the public_html  
directory, so we have familiarity with how that process works.

Is there some kind of glue code you guys have that allows us to accept  
name/value pairs encoded in the URL and use them inside of our build  
steps?  I would like to be able to create a URL that looks like this:
   http://buildmaster/builders/corezenoss_trunk_cent5-64?tag=trunk

And then in our master.cfg do something that looks like this:
corezenoss_steps = [
      FilenameAwareBuild(command=[
         "/home/buildslave/bbscripts/core/build_rpm.sh",
         webenv['tag'],
      ])]

Do you know if there already is a way for me to access WebStatus  
information from within my master.cfg?

Or can you recommend another approach we can take to accomplish the  
same thing?

Thanks for whatever help you can provide!


-c