[Buildbot-devel] timeout hook

[Ian Zimmerman]

My builders include test steps which can, and do, time out.  When that 
happens, the developers want to perform live exploratory surgery on the 
program being tested - essentially attach a debugger and run some 
commands to examine the hung program's data structures.

I suspect this should have been done outside of buildbot with some 
wrapper scripts and timeout independent of the buildbot timeout, but for 
historical reasons it was done by patching buildbot, to run a script 
(given as argument to ShellCommand constructor) on the slave. I now 
maintain that patch.  Would there be any interest in integrating it 
upstream?

Note that this cannot be done by a separate build step, because the 
program being tested is gone by then.

i