happiest unalice ever

I’m a little late in posting anything about this, but Bug 468731 - talos testing of builds using sendchange is a big deal. I had initially thought that we wouldn’t be able to make use of Buildbot’s senchange systems due to the weird hacking that Talos does to the Buildbot change object to move around all the pieces of information required by Talos.  Thankfully, catlee wasn’t nearly so pessimistic and found a way to make it work.

Mostly it sounds like a bunch of Buildbot nonsense that shouldn’t really interest anyone outside of the Release Engineering team, but it has huge benefits to sheriffs and developers.  With Talos buildbot now supporting sendchange we can push builds through the Talos testing infrastructure provided only a correctly formatted link to the build in question.  I’ve already used this to force a re-test of a build that had failed; it immediately failed again on different Talos test boxes and proved that the issue was in the build and not in Talos.

If a build is on stage and downloadable we can make Talos test it as many times as we want.  We still don’t have the means to push any build we like through, but retesting pretty much any build on staging can be very useful when trying to narrow down a regression range or figure out if a regression is ‘real’.  If you are in a situation where you would like to retest a build contact the Release Engineering team member on buildduty (identified as nick-buildduty on irc) and they’ll get it going for you.

Thanks, catlee!