[Buildbot-devel] Force scheduler accepting patch

[Dustin J. Mitchell]

On Tue, Oct 16, 2012 at 8:22 PM, Hugh Sorby <h.sorby at auckland.ac.nz> wrote:
> I have used the try scheduler to great success but what I would like to
> do is be able to supply a patch file through the force scheduler.  This
> way a developer would not have to install buildbot to test out a new
> feature.  So my question is, is this possible? or maybe could this be
> possible?

It's not currently possible, but it's actually a great idea: replace
the try scheduler with particular configurations of the force
scheduler, and use HTTP POST to submit the requests straight to the
force scheduler (or, probably better, to a closely related API
endpoint).  From what I can see, this would require:

* Allowing force schedulers to accept a patch
* Solving the relevant security questions - try allows anyone who can
submit a job to execute arbitrary code on slaves, so we need to be a
little careful
* Writing a new try client that doesn't require Buildbot, or Twisted,
probably.  It'd be nice if this was a separate Python package,
although it should probably be built out of the same repo as Buildbot.
* Adding the ability to force based on JSON input, in addition to
form-encoded data
* Unit tests
* Docs :)

Compared to some of the other projects underway in Buildbot, that's
actually pretty minor.  Want to give it a shot?

Dustin