[Buildbot-devel] Purpose of flattening commands passed to buildbot.steps.shell.ShellCommand

[Vladimir Rutsky]

Hello!

In current implementation if command passed to 
buildbot.steps.shell.ShellCommand contains lists or tuples they are 
recursively flattened using util.flatten:
https://github.com/buildbot/buildbot/blob/master/master/buildbot/steps/shell.py#L237

This flattening breaks obfuscation functionality in 
buildbot.steps.shell.ShellCommand, because tuples ('obfuscated', 'real', 
'fake') are flattened.

Is this flattening needed?

In my opinion it is very strange and uncommon operation, and if any 
ShellCommand client want to get their command flattened, they should 
explicitly call util.flatten before passing command to ShellCommand.


--
Vladimir Rutsky