[Buildbot-devel] Buildbot supporting buildset with multiple repositories

[Dustin J. Mitchell]

On Fri, Nov 18, 2011 at 12:44 AM, Jared Grubb <jared.grubb at gmail.com> wrote:
> So, my reasoning goes like this:
>
> 1. As you say, most properties are universal: there's exactly one value for the entire Build
>
> 2. As you say, each repo in a Build should have its own got_revision.
>    * Recording these in a dictionary is the obvious choice (repo is the key, got_revision is the value)
>
> 3. It seems that 'revision' and 'branch' are also repo-centric values.... From #2, we already have a dictionary with repo keys, so we could put these in there as well.
>
> 4. It's easy to take this solution and allow any property to be optionally overridden/specialized according to a repo key.
>
> I've noticed this was a common feature request and thought I'd throw this out there. It's not very novel (it's really no different from local-global variable scopes or namespacing) but it does generalize the idea of properties a bit and provide some flexibility... but maybe it's too general? Just an idea.

I think that our perspectives differ as follows: from my perspective,
properties are simply a convenience for step definitions, e.g., to
name a binary after the branch or revision it was built from.  The
values of concern to Buildbot are in the sourcestamp (or sourcestamps,
when we start using sets of sourcestamps), and that is a bit tricky,
but not impossible to solve.  I think that the problem of properties
for multiple sourcestamps can be solved with the existing property
semantics, without extending both the semantics and the API.

Dustin