Property placeholder does not work in shell command

[DavidIAm]

This configuration fragment:

tfactory = BuildFactory()
    tfactory.addStep(SVN(
                       svnurl=url,
                       mode='update'
                       ))
    tfactory.addStep(ShellCommand(env={'BUILD_NUMBER': Property("buildnumber")}, command=["make",target]));

[DavidIAm]

It appears that it is only allowing placeholders such as as a string containing ${buildnumber} through a regular expression (buildbot_slave-0.8.5-py2.7.egg/buildslave/runprocess.py:297)rather than allowing possible number value to be used as an environment value

[DavidIAm]

Resulted in this traceback:

remoteFailed: [Failure instance: Traceback from remote host -- Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/dihnen/tmp/buildbot/sandbox/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/Twisted-11.1.0-py2.7-linux-x86_64.egg/twisted/spread/pb.py", line 910, in _recvMessage
    netResult = object.remoteMessageReceived(self, message, netArgs, netKw)
  File "/home/dihnen/tmp/buildbot/sandbox/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/Twisted-11.1.0-py2.7-linux-x86_64.egg/twisted/spread/flavors.py", line 114, in remoteMessageReceived
    state = method(*args, **kw)
  File "/home/dihnen/tmp/buildbot/sandbox/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/buildbot_slave-0.8.5-py2.7.egg/buildslave/bot.py", line 141, in remote_startCommand
    d = self.command.doStart()
  File "/home/dihnen/tmp/buildbot/sandbox/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/buildbot_slave-0.8.5-py2.7.egg/buildslave/commands/base.py", line 145, in doStart
    d = defer.maybeDeferred(self.start)

[DavidIAm]

--- <exception caught here> ---
  File "/home/dihnen/tmp/buildbot/sandbox/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/Twisted-11.1.0-py2.7-linux-x86_64.egg/twisted/internet/defer.py", line 134, in maybeDeferred
    result = f(*args, **kw)
  File "/home/dihnen/tmp/buildbot/sandbox/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/buildbot_slave-0.8.5-py2.7.egg/buildslave/commands/shell.py", line 41, in start
    logEnviron=args.get('logEnviron', True),

[DavidIAm]

File "/home/dihnen/tmp/buildbot/sandbox/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/buildbot_slave-0.8.5-py2.7.egg/buildslave/runprocess.py", line 307, in init

newenv[key] = p.sub(subst, environ[key])

exceptions.TypeError?: expected string or buffer exceptions.TypeError?: expected string or buffer ]

[tom.prince]

What is going on here is that Property("buildnumber") gets rendered as an int, which then causes the environment substitution to fail later.

Certainly we should have a better error message here, but I'm not sure if we want to be automatically coercing things to strings. Certainly it is reasonable for ints, but we don't also want to do it for arbitrary objects.

A work around is to do WithProperty("%(buildnumber)s"), which does deliberately coerce things.

[DavidIAm]

Update documentation at the very least to make it clear that Property doesn't change the type of the variable, and that environment variable values must be strings. Probably also be a goo d idea to annotate the data type of each of the common properties listed.

[Dustin J. Mitchell]

Only accept strings/lists for env values

This includes a docs update as well as a better exception. Fixes #2212.

Changeset: a1c7b124aead9d866fae881f5280266c0a085ef5