[Buildbot-devel] Grouping steps (teething troubles writing a custom BuildStep)

[Charles Lepple]

On Tue, Nov 4, 2008 at 4:34 AM, Ellis Breen
<spacestation9 at googlemail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> We have been running a regression test system using Buildbot for many
> months, and now have a master.cfg that generates many hundreds of steps.
> Unfortunately, this is making it difficult to view the entirety of a build
> on the Waterfall display. Hence, I am trying to find a way of putting steps
> into groups. I didn't spot anything in the API docs or manual regarding
> this, so am attempting to write my own custom BuildStep to allow this, but
> am still familiarising myself with the codebase.

Have you tried just concatenating the commands with '&&'? To make this
work, you would have to use a single string (rather than a list of
strings) to tell buildbot that you want the shell to interpret the
command, e.g.:

"test1 && test2 && test3"

> I'm hacking around at the moment trying to create a 'GroupStep' class
> (inheriting from the LoggingBuildStep class) . My current thinking is that I
> might be able to create a 'sub-builder' in this class and then add builds to
> that, which can in turn have steps added to them. Not sure how I'd monitor
> the progress of such a buildstep, but hopefully it wouldn't be too
> dissimilar to the way things work now.

If you do go this route, it would be possible to update the waterfall
after each sub-step has completed.

I have some code to do this, but it's not handy at the moment.

> Is there any
> additional developer documentation around?

Have you seen the API documentation?
http://buildbot.net/repos/release/docs/reference/index.html

-- 
- Charles Lepple