[Buildbot-devel] BuildStep tangle [Was: Easy question]

[Dustin J. Mitchell]

On Feb 15, 2012 3:21 AM, "Ian Zimmerman" <itz at buug.org> wrote:
> I had a look and, as a complete surprise to me, this way of specifying
> steps seems to be still supported.

Indeed, we try to maintain configuration compatibility as much as possible.
But this thread is about writing subclasses, not specifying steps.

> It seems to me that underlying all the confusion and inelegance is the
> use of the kwargs member as a kitchen sink.  Why do for example
> parameters for RemoteShellCommand have to be flattened into the
> ShellCommand's kwargs?  If they were passed as a separate dictionary
> (ie. a _single_ argument for ShellCommand), there would be no need for
> the params mechanism in this case.  Maybe something similar is true for
> all step classes?

This is annoying and awkward, but unique to the ShellCommand class and not
specifically related to the self-factory pattern.

I wonder if some metaclasses could help here?  This could capture the
initial constructor args to be re-applied when instantiating a step for a
build.

Alternately, if steps were simply deepcopied when instantiated for a build,
and the constructor skipped, that might be even easier!

I'd love to see a proof of concept..

Dustin
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