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

[Greg Ward]

On 04 November 2008, Ellis Breen said:
> 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.
[...]
> Am I trying to reinvent the wheel? If so, what would you recommend using
> instead?

How about a good old fashioned shell script?  That is, instead of 100
ShellCommands in your master.cfg, write one shell script that runs 100
commands.  (Don't forget "set -e"!  That makes the shell script die as
soon as any step dies.)

If you need Buildbot to track/display log files for each command, I'm
pretty sure there is a provision for that: you just have to arrange for
each command to write to a log file and then tell Buildbot the name of
each file.  See the 'logfiles' optional arg to ShellCommand
(http://buildbot.net/repos/release/docs/buildbot.html#ShellCommand).

        Greg