Incomplete/Confusing Package Recipe API

[dobey]

According to https://edge.launchpad.net/+apidoc/devel.html#source_package_recipe there isn't any way to get the list of currently configured default series set on the recipe from the LP UI. It however, requires the distroseries and pocket arguments. Neither of these make sense to be required if there is a defualt configured value. The pocket option also doesn't make much sense if the packages can not be placed into an archive other than a PPA.

I also think that 'archive' should be optional, and 'Daily build archive' should be renamed to 'Default archive' as the default location for the builds to be placed.

I would also like to be able to get and set the default distro series array, and description, from the API.

[Aaron Bentley (abentley)]

On 07/20/2010 03:23 PM, Rodney Dawes wrote:
> Public bug reported:
>
> According to
> https://edge.launchpad.net/+apidoc/devel.html#source_package_recipe
> there isn't any way to get the list of currently configured default
> series set on the recipe from the LP UI. It however, requires the
> distroseries and pocket arguments. Neither of these make sense to be
> required if there is a defualt configured value.

This is the API we use, and these values are required in order to use
it. We do not use the default value if none is supplied. For on-demand
builds, we use the value supplied by the user, who may choose to accept
the default. For daily builds, we explicitly supply the values
configured for daily builds.

> The pocket option also
> doesn't make much sense if the packages can not be placed into an
> archive other than a PPA.

That is a current limitation, but we expect that to change.

> I also think that 'archive' should be optional, and 'Daily build
> archive' should be renamed to 'Default archive' as the default location
> for the builds to be placed.

That would be inaccurate, since the "Default archive" would not be the
default archive supplied by the user interface.

> I would also like to be able to get and set the default distro series
> array, and description, from the API.

That is reasonable. It hasn't been implemented so far because it's not
well supported by the Zope security mechanisms.

Aaron

[dobey (dobey)]

I just had another thought for this. It would also be nice to get the list of inProgressBiulds for a given recipe. This could be a dict of { 'series' : 'buildstatus' } for example, for all the series that a recipe is set up to build for. This would help avoid requesting builds for recipes that are waiting to be built.

With the tarmac plug-in I am writing to trigger package builds when a set of branches has finished landing, this would be extremely useful to avoid requesting builds all the time, if they're already requested and pending.

[Aaron Bentley (abentley)]

There are two issues with your use case for inProgressBuilds:
1. We don't want to encourage people to do more-than-daily builds. buildfarm resources are scarce.
2. We don't want to encourage people to do look-before-you-leap. Just request a build and handle the error if there is one.