[Buildbot-devel] Annoying behavior for ShellCommand under Win32

[exarkun at twistedmatrix.com]

On 07:12 pm, fcrestois at hotmail.com wrote:
>
>I am integrating Buildbot 7.12 with Python 2.6 and Twisted 8.2 under 
>Windows XP
>And I find the same annoying behavior than BuildBot 7.5 with Python 2.4 
>and Twisted 2.4
>
>For windows user, It is very convenient to start directly the 
>VisualStudio devenv command line to make a build
>This command line have a parameters like  1Cplateform|configuration 1D
>
>If I run a simple build factory with a shell command step like
>
>from buildbot.steps.shell import ShellCommand
>factory.addStep(ShellCommand(command=r'echo "Win32|Release"'))
>
>The stdio display the wrong result \"Win32|Release\"
>
>The problem come from the function cmdLineQuote(s) from 
>twisted\python\win32.py
>The  1Cquoting under windows 1D thread is a 5 years old bug : 
>http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/ticket/1123

Thanks for pointing this out.  I was going to point you at this buildbot 
ticket:

  http://buildbot.net/trac/ticket/377

which itself refers to another ticket in the Twisted tracker:

  http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/ticket/3933

which is closed as invalid.  I think #3933 was a duplicate of #1123, so 
I'm going to go close #1123 as invalid now as well.

Here's my conclusion from ticket #3933:

  Okay, so after some more careful investigation, including tracking down 
the source of this report to http://buildbot.net/trac/ticket/377 and far 
more time than I really cared to spend reading documentation about 
Windows brain damage, my conclusion is that this isn't a valid bug.

  The API Twisted wraps, CreateProcess, does not require | to be quoted. 
Quoting does no harm, but neither does it do any good. Instead, it is 
certain other programs which have quoting rules of which Twisted is 
presently unaware. For example, cmd.exe does require | to be quoted. 
spawnProcess is the wrong place to fix cmd.exe quoting issues, though. 
Instead, if a nice, error-resistant cmd.exe-invocation API is desired, 
it should be layered on top of spawnProcess and the appropriate quoting 
rules added there.

I still think this is true.  BuildBot is providing an API for invoking 
cmd.exe, apparently.  This means the quoting rules belong somewhere in 
BuildBot.  I'm not familiar enough with BuildBot's command running code 
to say exactly where this belongs, though.

Jean-Paul