Allow builder to be associated with multiple categories

[stefan]

I'd like to be able to associate builders to multiple categories, so they can appear in multiple views in the web status UI. (I'e like to classify along multiple axes, such as "internal" vs. "public", as well as "stable" vs. "devel".

[dustin]

I think that the better way to do this right now is to use longer strings for categories and match them with regexes. The web interface doesn't currently support filtering with regexes, but bug #789 might fix that.

[stefan]

At least conceptually, I think it's wrong to make "category" (no matter singular or plural) a property of a builder. Instead, I think "category" should be a first-class entity which contains a list of associated builders. With that approach it doesn't matter how many categories list the same builder, as the builder wouldn't be aware of that at all.

How does this sound ? (I may actually implement that, if that has a chance to make it into mainline.)

Thanks,

[dustin]

If you can do it in a backward-compatible way, then it sounds fine. Note that we have two separate categories of category! Changes have categories, as do builders. To reduce user confusion, anything that happens to builder categories should probably happen to change categories, too.

[dustin]

Maybe we should introduce builder "tags", and make category a deprecated special case of that?

[jaredgrubb]

Have a patch in progress. Per discussion with Dustin today at the sprint, the approach is:

• deprecate the use of categories w.r.t builders (but not changes)
• a builder now has 'tags'
• a category set on a builder (or specified in a web status url) will just really alias as a tag
• updating grid, t-grid, waterfall, mail, and feed

[dustin]

Did this get implemented? If not, it should be done on the nine branch at this point.