Release Notes for Buildbot 0.8.7p1

The following are the release notes for Buildbot 0.8.7p1. Buildbot 0.8.7 was released on September 22, 2012. Buildbot 0.8.7p1 was released on November 21, 2012.

0.8.7p1

In addition to what's listed below, the 0.8.7p1 release adds the following.

  • The SetPropertiesFromEnv step now correctly gets environment variables from the slave, rather than those set on the master. Also, it logs the changes made to properties.
  • The master-side Git source step now doesn't try to clone a branch called HEAD. This is what git does by default, and specifying it explicitly doesn't work as expected.
  • The Git step properly deals with the case when there is a file called FETCH_HEAD in the checkout.
  • Buildbot no longer forks when told not to daemonize.
  • Buildbot's startup is now more robust. See bug #1992.
  • The Trigger step uses the provided list of source stamps exactly, if given, instead of adding them to the sourcestamps of the current build. In 0.8.7, they were combined with the source stamps for the current build.
  • The Trigger step again completely ignores the source stamp of the current build, if alwaysUseLatest is set. In 0.8.7, this was mistakenly changed to only ignore the specified revision of the source stamp.
  • The Triggerable scheduler is again properly passing changes through to the scheduled builds. See bug #2376.
  • Web change hooks log errors, allowing debugging.
  • The base change hook now properly decodes the provided date.
  • CVSMailDir has been fixed.
  • Importing buildbot.test no longer causes python to exit, if mock insn't installed. The fixes pydoc -k when buildbot is installed.
  • Mercurial properly updates to the correct branch, when using inrepo branches.
  • Buildbot now doesn't fail on invalid UTF-8 in a number of places.
  • Many documenation updates and fixes.

Master

Features

  • Buildbot now supports building projects composed of multiple codebases. New schedulers can aggregate changes to multiple codebases into source stamp sets (with one source stamp for each codebase). Source steps then check out each codebase as required, and the remainder of the build process proceeds normally. See the Multiple-Codebase Builds for details.
    • The format of the got_revision property has changed for multi-codebase builds. It is now a dictionary keyed by codebase.
  • Source and ShellCommand steps now have an optional descriptionSuffix, a suffix to the description/descriptionDone values. For example this can help distinguish between multiple Compile steps that are applied to different codebases.
  • The Git step has a new getDescription option, which will run git describe after checkout normally. See Git for details.
  • A new interpolation placeholder Interpolate, with more regular syntax, is available.
  • A new ternary substitution operator :? and :#? is available with the Interpolate class.
  • IRenderable.getRenderingFor can now return a deferred.
  • The mercurial hook now supports multiple masters. See pull request 436.
  • There's a new poller for Mercurial: HgPoller.
  • The new HTPasswdAprAuth uses libaprutil (through ctypes) to validate the password against the hash from the .htpasswd file. This adds support for all hash types htpasswd can generate.
  • GitPoller has been rewritten. It now supports multiple branches and can share a directory between multiple pollers. It is also more resilient to changes in configuration, or in the underlying repository.
  • Added a new property httpLoginUrl to buildbot.status.web.authz.Authz to render a nice Login link in WebStatus for unauthenticated users if useHttpHeader and httpLoginUrl are set.
  • ForceScheduler has been updated:
    • support for multiple codebases via the codebases parameter
    • NestedParameter to provide a logical grouping of parameters.
    • CodebaseParameter to set the branch/revision/repository/project for a codebase
    • new HTML/CSS customization points. Each parameter is contained in a row with multiple 'class' attributes associated with them (eg, 'force-string' and 'force-nested') as well as a unique id to use with Javascript. Explicit line-breaks have been removed from the HTML generator and are now controlled using CSS.
  • The SVNPoller now supports multiple projects and codebases. See pull request 443.
  • The MailNotifier now takes a callable to calculate the "previous" build for purposes of determining status changes. See pull request 489.
  • The copy_properties parameter, given a list of properties to copy into the new build request, has been deprecated in favor of explicit use of set_properties.
  • The nextSlave builder configuration argument can return a Deferred.

Deprecations, Removals, and Non-Compatible Changes

  • Buildbot master now requires at least Python-2.5 and Twisted-9.0.0.

  • Passing a BuildStep subclass (rather than instance) to addStep is no longer supported. The addStep method now takes exactly one argument.

  • Buildbot master requires python-dateutil version 1.5 to support the Nightly scheduler.

  • ForceScheduler has been updated to support multiple codebases. The branch/revision/repository/project are deprecated; if you have customized these values, simply provide them as codebases=[CodebaseParameter(name='', ...)].

    • The POST URL names for AnyPropertyParameter fields have changed. For example, 'property1name' is now 'property1_name', and 'property1value' is now 'property1_value'. Please update any bookmarked or saved URL's that used these fields.
    • forcesched.BaseParameter API has changed quite a bit and is no longer backwards compatible. Updating guidelines:
      • get_from_post is renamed to getFromKwargs
      • update_from_post is renamed to updateFromKwargs. This function's parameters are now called via named parameters to allow subclasses to ignore values it doesnt use. Subclasses should add **unused for future compatibility. A new parameter sourcestampset is provided to allow subclasses to modify the sourcestamp set, and will probably require you to add the **unused field.
  • The parameters to the callable version of build.workdir have changed. Instead of a single sourcestamp, a list of sourcestamps is passed. Each sourcestamp in the list has a different codebase

  • The undocumented renderable _ComputeRepositoryURL is no longer imported to buildbot.steps.source. It is still available at buildbot.steps.source.oldsource.

  • IProperties.render now returns a deferred, so any code rendering properties by hand will need to take this into account.

  • baseURL has been removed in SVN to use just repourl - see bug #2066. Branch info should be provided with Interpolate.

    from buildbot.steps.source.svn import SVN
    factory.append(SVN(baseURL="svn://svn.example.org/svn/"))
    

    can be replaced with

    from buildbot.process.properties import Interpolate
    from buildbot.steps.source.svn import SVN
    factory.append(SVN(repourl=Interpolate("svn://svn.example.org/svn/%(src::branch)s")))
    

    and

    from buildbot.steps.source.svn import SVN
    factory.append(SVN(baseURL="svn://svn.example.org/svn/%%BRANCH%%/project"))
    

    can be replaced with

    from buildbot.process.properties import Interpolate
    from buildbot.steps.source.svn import SVN
    factory.append(SVN(repourl=Interpolate("svn://svn.example.org/svn/%(src::branch)s/project")))
    

    and

    from buildbot.steps.source.svn import SVN
    factory.append(SVN(baseURL="svn://svn.example.org/svn/", defaultBranch="branches/test"))
    

    can be replaced with

    from buildbot.process.properties import Interpolate
    from buildbot.steps.source.svn import SVN
    factory.append(SVN(repourl=Interpolate("svn://svn.example.org/svn/%(src::branch:-branches/test)s")))
    
  • The P4Sync step, deprecated since 0.8.5, has been removed. The P4 step remains.

  • The fetch_spec argument to GitPoller is no longer supported. GitPoller now only downloads branches that it is polling, so specifies a refspec itself.

  • The format of the changes produced by SVNPoller has changed: directory pathnames end with a forward slash. This allows the split_file function to distinguish between files and directories. Customized split functions may need to be adjusted accordingly.

  • WithProperties has been deprecated in favor of Interpolate. Interpolate doesn't handle functions as keyword arguments. The following code using WithProperties

    from buildbot.process.properties import WithProperties
    def determine_foo(props):
        if props.hasProperty('bar'):
            return props['bar']
        elif props.hasProperty('baz'):
            return props['baz']
        return 'qux'
    WithProperties('%(foo)s', foo=determine_foo)
    

    can be replaced with

    from zope.interface import implementer
    from buildbot.interfaces import IRenderable
    from buildbot.process.properties import Interpolate
    @implementer(IRenderable)
    class determineFoo(object):
        def getRenderingFor(self, props):
            if props.hasProperty('bar'):
                return props['bar']
            elif props.hasProperty('baz'):
                return props['baz']
            return 'qux'
    Interpolate('%s(kw:foo)s', foo=determineFoo())
    

Changes for Developers

  • BuildStep.start can now optionally return a deferred and any errback will be handled gracefully. If you use inlineCallbacks, this means that unexpected exceptions and failures raised will be captured and logged and the build shut down normally.
  • The helper methods getState and setState from BaseScheduler have been factored into buildbot.util.state.StateMixin for use elsewhere.

Slave

Features

Deprecations, Removals, and Non-Compatible Changes

  • The P4Sync step, deprecated since 0.8.5, has been removed. The P4 step remains.

Details

For a more detailed description of the changes made in this version, see the git log itself:

git log v0.8.6..v0.8.7

Older Versions

Release notes for older versions of Buildbot are available in the master/docs/relnotes/ directory of the source tree. Newer versions are also available here: