Generalising bzr-builder

[James Westby]

On Mon Nov 16 04:14:42 -0600 2009 Ian Clatworthy wrote:
> I started reading the bzr-builder code today. It looks pretty neat.

Thanks.

> I've got some code changes and help changes I'll be submitting soon.
> I'll also be adding builder to the Plugins Guide. The best place to put
> it will depend on whether we generalise it or not so I thought I'd raise
> the idea for consideration.

I look forward to receiving your contributions.

> In particular, the "build" command nicely solves a common problem:
> building a "tree image" from multiple pieces. As well as building a tree
> ready for deb packaging, it looks useful for building QA images for
> testing and images for packaging distro packages, Windows installers and
> OS X bundles. I wonder if we should generalise it accordingly? At first
> glance, it wouldn't take much to do this, e.g. moving the deb-version
> clause out of the top line into an optional command, say. Alternatively,
> we could put "build" and "dailydeb" into different plugins?

I have thought about this myself. "build" is intentionally not packaging
specific, but the recipe format is. I think we should change that. I'm
not sure what the best format change would be.

As for splitting, we could move dailydeb in to bzr-builddeb once they
can work together, and have it depend on bzr-builder. This would
mean that bzr-builder wouldn't expect to have debian packaging specific
tools available. It would mean that bzr-builder wouldn't be the
"daily builds" thing any more. I'm not sure this is important.

Thanks,

James