[Buildbot-devel] Clean environment on build slaves

[Greg Ward]

Hi all --

I've just realized that our builds run with a very different
environment depending on whether the BuildBot slave daemon was started
at boot time (with a @reboot entry in crontab) or manually (ssh to the
slave and run "buildbot restart"). In particular, when restarted
manually, BuildBot inherits the user's LANG setting, which meant that
we hid a buggy unit test for two months -- it was only after I
rebooted the slave on Friday that builds started failing because the
test accidentally depended on Java's default encoding, which is
derived from LANG. Ooops.

So I'd like to find a way to clean the environment of each build slave
*or* of each build. Didn't see anything in the manual. We're currently
running 0.7.12; we haven't had a good reason to upgrade to 0.8 yet,
but I'm willing to do so if necessary.

Best idea we've had so far is to hack something into the buildbot.tac
file on each slave, but I don't like the idea of maintaining that hack
on 5 slaves running 3 operating systems. I'd much rather have
something under the control of master.cfg.

Thanks --

Greg