[Buildbot-devel] timeout hook

[Marcus Lindblom]

Ian Zimmerman wrote:
> 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.

Ground rule: if you need it, I'm sure other people need it as well. :)

Personally, I think a generic hook would be useful, as we have some 
tests that time-out and then we need to manually fix things on the 
slave. It would be good to know explicitly when that happens, instead of 
waiting to see if someone fixes the slave and then realize after half a 
day that it was stuck with some left-over processes.

Cheers,
/Marcus