[users at bb.net] Getting source URL and revision in build step

[Will Newton]

On Thu, Nov 16, 2017 at 1:49 PM, Pierre Tardy <tardyp at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Will,
>
> Repo is a little bit different from the other source control, as it is a
> higher level interface to git.
>
> The manifest repository does not itself point to the source code that
> Buildbot should be watching, but rather points to a list of repositories
> that buildbot should be watching.
>
> So the way that is currently in buildbot open source code is to have a
> builder per manifest, then you would hardcode the manifest url and branch
> that you are looking at.

I'm not sure what this workflow looks like to the developer. Could you explain?

I am imagining something like:

1. I modify a repository
2. I create a branch in the manifest repository that points the
repository in question to the new revision in the manifest
3. A build occurs to tell me if this change was good
4. I merge the change to the release branch

It seems like the current model means I can setup builders for a fixed
set of branches so I could only build my release branches?

> Finally you would setup a scheduler which watch the branches you know that
> the manifest is pointing to.
>
> A better approach would be to parse the manifest and to watch exactly the
> touple (repository, branch) that the manifest is really pointing at, but
> this is much more complicated. (In my previous job, this is what we were
> doing, but the code was quite specific to our workflow, and we never
> upstreamed it)