[Buildbot-devel] how to link gerrit change to repo

[Pierre Tardy]

Hello list,
I'm looking for some advice implementing the repo+gerrit advanced features.

Here is the current design:

gerritchangesource is getting change events from gerrit ssh server.
Two types of events are useful.

change-merged: means a new change has entered the mainline. buildset
can be triggered to rebuild the mainline for every platform.
This is the trivial case, currently implemented and working.

patchset-created; means that a developer is pushing a new patch for
review. Usually, buildbot user wants to make a build with this patch
to see if it compiles, and then try to run the result.

 1) automatically, the patch is applied on top of a the latest
mainline, build are triggered for everyplatform. repo source fetcher
can extract patch information from the change properties.
 2) The developer tells this is a set of 4 patches that are mutually
interdependant (but not managed by gerrit as dependant). buildbot user
 must tell buildbot manually (via web interface) what patches to apply
on top of mainline

I'm looking on how to implement use cases 1 and 2 with the same
mechanism. I have idea on how to hack 2 with repo source fetcher
looking on specially crafted property, but I'm not very happy with it.
It is possible to report the user the list of old changes and let him
trigger a build by selecting several of them?

In the case of several change happening quickly (and low number of
slaves), I've seen buildbot grouping changes in one build. This
behaviour is what is needed for change-merged event types, but not
with 'patchset-created' wich are more frequent and which really need
one build per change.


Regards,
Pierre