Merging of buildrequests should be configurable

[Pike]

I have a similar issue like Ian had in  http://github.com/djmitche/buildbot/commit/86f5cab0fc5a4c4ef79886901bbe2913c63d6d55, I'm sending off build requests with different properties to create different variants of a build. In my case, which branch and which locale to build.

In particular as the actual merge ignores the properties on the requests, I would like to make an additional check and only merge if the properties of the two build requests are equal.

Right now, I just brute-force don't merge at all ever, which makes me run a flock of builds when a get 5 changes for one locale. Which happens, thanks to hg, rather easily in one push.

[dustin]

Do you want to hack up a way to provide a "mergable" function that can be provided from the config file, and which will decide if two buildrequests are mergeable? That seems the most generla solution.

[Pike]

I'd like to keep that the way it is for now. My longer-term thinking is to factor the two places where we merge build requests, scheduler and build, into one, and then to move that out to make it configurable, as part of the load-balancer at some point.

[Pike]

Dustin, I took a look at the tests, and it seems to me that we shouldn't have taken  http://github.com/djmitche/buildbot/commit/86f5cab0fc5a4c4ef79886901bbe2913c63d6d55, nor that we should take a similar patch to do this for properties.

Looking at test_buildreq, we actually rely on build reasons to be merged, though the test doesn't catch if tests wouldn't merge ;-). Similar arguments go for properties.

So I will in fact go in and factor that code out, and morph this ticket to do that. I'll try to get something up in the coming days.

[Pike]

 http://github.com/Pike/buildbot/tree/bug415 would welcome some review.

I'll post to the list to gather some feedback, too.

[dustin]

as I mentioned on the mailing list, I like everything about this *except* the heavyweight LoadManager.

[Pike]

Updated the branch with a simple callable for cmergeRequests?.

[dustin]

commit 2825dbf3380732c0300a0934b9842783b80971aa
Author: Dustin J. Mitchell <dustin@zmanda.com>
Date:   Sun Feb 1 12:13:46 2009 -0500

    (fixes #415) doc tweaks to Pike's patch

commit 38e7a00e1e4f1a6520a88abb89a444c51352e2e8
Merge: 6240a8f... a811624...
Author: Dustin J. Mitchell <dustin@zmanda.com>
Date:   Sun Feb 1 11:46:24 2009 -0500

    Merge branch 'bug415' of git://github.com/Pike/buildbot into bug415

Thanks!