Change BuildMaster UI so it can "force a step" or "force a step-and-any-dependent-steps"

[joduinn]

Currently, in buildbot master, if you want to force a build, you can click on the "Force Build" button.

1) Can you change the text of the "Force Build" button to "Force step" or "Start now" or something similar? I ask because steps triggered by this button do not have to be compiling code. Nitpick I know, but...

2) Can you add a button to do "Force step-and-dependent-steps". Sometimes we do want to just rerun a specific step, so I think the first button is still useful. However, othertimes we want to trigger a chain of dependent steps, so I think this enhancement would be good.

Hope that makes sense.

[warner]

1): well, what we're forcing here is a Build (in buildbot terminology), which is a collection of Steps. So "Force step" would be incorrect. "Build" doesn't have to imply compile (in fact most of my buildbots are testing python code, which doesn't really have a distinct compile step at all).

Maybe there is some extra text we could add around that button which would make it clear that the thing we're starting by pushing this button is the same thing that the builder would have done on its own in response to changes?

2) running just subsets of a Build is a lot trickier. I think the first phase would be to add some code to the Build-handling logic to accept flags/parameters that influence the way the build is performed (like, "only run these particular unit tests"). #57 might be related. The "Force Build" page would then need to acquire some form input elements to fill in these flags. Finally, one of the flags could be "please start at the step named X".

[warner]

no progress on this yet, bumping to 0.7.8

[warner]

this needs too much code to finish in the next week, bumping to 0.7.9

[dustin]

Steps are always run in a build. That's just not going to change.