# 5.109. Release Notes for Buildbot v0.8.7

The following are the release notes for Buildbot v0.8.7. Buildbot v0.8.7 was released on September 22, 2012. Buildbot 0.8.7p1 was released on November 21, 2012.

## 5.109.1. 0.8.7p1

In addition to what’s listed below, the 0.8.7p1 release adds the following.

- The `SetPropertiesFromEnv` step now correctly gets environment variables from the slave, rather than those set on the master. Also, it logs the changes made to properties.

- The master-side `Git` source step now doesn’t try to clone a branch called `HEAD`. This is what `git` does by default, and specifying it explicitly doesn’t work as expected.

- The `Git` step properly deals with the case when there is a file called `FETCH_HEAD` in the checkout.

- Buildbot no longer forks when told not to daemonize.

- Buildbot’s startup is now more robust. See bug #1992.

- The `Trigger` step uses the provided list of source stamps exactly, if given, instead of adding them to the sourcestamps of the current build. In 0.8.7, they were combined with the source stamps for the current build.

- The `Trigger` step again completely ignores the source stamp of the current build, if `alwaysUseLatest` is set. In 0.8.7, this was mistakenly changed to only ignore the specified revision of the source stamp.

- The `Triggerable` scheduler is again properly passing changes through to the scheduled builds. See bug #2376.

- Web change hooks log errors, allowing debugging.

- The `base` change hook now properly decodes the provided date.

- `CVSMailDir` has been fixed.

- Importing `buildbot.test` no longer causes python to exit, if `mock` isn’t installed. The fixes `pydoc -k` when buildbot is installed.

- `Mercurial` properly updates to the correct branch, when using `inrepo` branches.

- Buildbot now doesn’t fail on invalid UTF-8 in a number of places.

- Many documentation updates and fixes.

## 5.109.2. Master

### 5.109.2.1. Features

- Buildbot now supports building projects composed of multiple codebases. New schedulers can aggregate changes to multiple codebases into source stamp sets (with one source stamp for each codebase). Source steps then check out each codebase as required, and the remainder of the build process proceeds normally. See the Multiple-Codebase Builds for details.

  - The format of the `got_revision` property has changed for multi-codebase builds. It is now a dictionary keyed by codebase.

- `Source` and `ShellCommand` steps now have an optional `descriptionSuffix`, a suffix to the `description`/`descriptionDone` values. For example this can help distinguish between multiple `Compile` steps that are applied to different codebases.

- The `Git` step has a new `getDescription` option, which will run `git describe` after checkout normally. See `Git` for details.

- A new interpolation placeholder Interpolate, with more regular syntax, is available.

- A new ternary substitution operator `:?` and `:#?` is available with the `Interpolate` class.

- `IRenderable.getRenderingFor` can now return a deferred.

- The Mercurial hook now supports multiple masters. See pull request 436.

- There’s a new poller for Mercurial: `HgPoller`.

- The new `HTPasswdAprAuth` uses libaprutil (through ctypes) to validate the password against the hash from the .htpasswd file. This adds support for all hash types htpasswd can generate.

- `GitPoller` has been rewritten. It now supports multiple branches and can share a directory between multiple pollers. It is also more resilient to changes in configuration, or in the underlying repository.

- Added a new property `httpLoginUrl` to `buildbot.status.web.authz.Authz` to render a nice Login link in WebStatus for unauthenticated users if `useHttpHeader` and `httpLoginUrl` are set.

- `ForceScheduler` has been updated:

  - support for multiple codebases via the `codebases` parameter

  - `NestedParameter` to provide a logical grouping of parameters.

  - `CodebaseParameter` to set the branch/revision/repository/project for a codebase

  - new HTML/CSS customization points. Each parameter is contained in a `row` with multiple ‘class’ attributes associated with them (eg, ‘force-string’ and ‘force-nested’) as well as a unique id to use with Javascript. Explicit line-breaks have been removed from the HTML generator and are now controlled using CSS.

- The `SVNPoller` now supports multiple projects and codebases. See pull request 443.

- The `MailNotifier` now takes a callable to calculate the “previous” build for purposes of determining status changes. See pull request 489.

- The `copy_properties` parameter, given a list of properties to copy into the new build request, has been deprecated in favor of explicit use of `set_properties`.

### 5.109.2.2. Deprecations, Removals, and Non-Compatible Changes

- Buildbot master now requires at least Python-2.5 and Twisted-9.0.0.

- Passing a `BuildStep` subclass (rather than instance) to `addStep` is no longer supported. The `addStep` method now takes exactly one argument.

- Buildbot master requires `python-dateutil` version 1.5 to support the Nightly scheduler.

- `ForceScheduler` has been updated to support multiple codebases. The branch/revision/repository/project are deprecated; if you have customized these values, simply provide them as `codebases=[CodebaseParameter(name='', ...)]`.

  > - The POST URL names for `AnyPropertyParameter` fields have changed. For example, ‘property1name’ is now ‘property1_name’, and ‘property1value’ is now ‘property1_value’. Please update any bookmarked or saved URL’s that used these fields.

  > - `forcesched.BaseParameter` API has changed quite a bit and is no longer backwards compatible. Updating guidelines:

  >   - `get_from_post` is renamed to `getFromKwargs`

  >   - `update_from_post` is renamed to `updateFromKwargs`. This function’s parameters are now called via named parameters to allow subclasses to ignore values it doesn’t use. Subclasses should add `**unused` for future compatibility. A new parameter `sourcestampset` is provided to allow subclasses to modify the sourcestamp set, and will probably require you to add the `**unused` field.

- The parameters to the callable version of `build.workdir` have changed. Instead of a single sourcestamp, a list of sourcestamps is passed. Each sourcestamp in the list has a different codebase

- The undocumented renderable `_ComputeRepositoryURL` is no longer imported to `buildbot.steps.source`. It is still available at `buildbot.steps.source.oldsource`.

- `IProperties.render` now returns a deferred, so any code rendering properties by hand will need to take this into account.

- `baseURL` has been removed in `SVN` to use just `repourl` - see bug #2066. Branch info should be provided with `Interpolate`.

      from buildbot.steps.source.svn import SVN
      factory.append(SVN(baseURL="svn://svn.example.org/svn/"))

  can be replaced with

      from buildbot.process.properties import Interpolate
      from buildbot.steps.source.svn import SVN
      factory.append(SVN(repourl=Interpolate("svn://svn.example.org/svn/%(src::branch)s")))

  and

      from buildbot.steps.source.svn import SVN
      factory.append(SVN(baseURL="svn://svn.example.org/svn/%%BRANCH%%/project"))

  can be replaced with

      from buildbot.process.properties import Interpolate
      from buildbot.steps.source.svn import SVN
      factory.append(SVN(repourl=Interpolate(
          "svn://svn.example.org/svn/%(src::branch)s/project")))

  and

      from buildbot.steps.source.svn import SVN
      factory.append(SVN(baseURL="svn://svn.example.org/svn/", defaultBranch="branches/test"))

  can be replaced with

      from buildbot.process.properties import Interpolate
      from buildbot.steps.source.svn import SVN
      factory.append(SVN(repourl=Interpolate(
          "svn://svn.example.org/svn/%(src::branch:-branches/test)s")))

- The `P4Sync` step, deprecated since 0.8.5, has been removed. The `P4` step remains.

- The `fetch_spec` argument to `GitPoller` is no longer supported. `GitPoller` now only downloads branches that it is polling, so specifies a refspec itself.

- The format of the changes produced by `SVNPoller` has changed: directory pathnames end with a forward slash. This allows the `split_file` function to distinguish between files and directories. Customized split functions may need to be adjusted accordingly.

- FlattenList has been deprecated in favor of Interpolate. Interpolate doesn’t handle functions as keyword arguments. The following code using `WithProperties`

      from buildbot.process.properties import WithProperties
      def determine_foo(props):
          if props.hasProperty('bar'):
              return props['bar']
          elif props.hasProperty('baz'):
              return props['baz']
          return 'qux'
      WithProperties('%(foo)s', foo=determine_foo)

  can be replaced with

      from zope.interface import implementer
      from buildbot.interfaces import IRenderable
      from buildbot.process.properties import Interpolate
      @implementer(IRenderable)
      class determineFoo(object):
          def getRenderingFor(self, props):
              if props.hasProperty('bar'):
                  return props['bar']
              elif props.hasProperty('baz'):
                  return props['baz']
              return 'qux'
      Interpolate('%s(kw:foo)s', foo=determineFoo())

### 5.109.2.3. Changes for Developers

- `BuildStep.start` can now optionally return a deferred and any errback will be handled gracefully. If you use `inlineCallbacks`, this means that unexpected exceptions and failures raised will be captured and logged and the build shut down normally.

- The helper methods `getState` and `setState` from `BaseScheduler` have been factored into `buildbot.util.state.StateMixin` for use elsewhere.

## 5.109.3. Slave

### 5.109.3.1. Features

### 5.109.3.2. Deprecations, Removals, and Non-Compatible Changes

- The `P4Sync` step, deprecated since 0.8.5, has been removed. The `P4` step remains.

## 5.109.4. Details

For a more detailed description of the changes made in this version, see the Git log itself:

    git log v0.8.6..v0.8.7

## 5.109.5. Older Versions

Release notes for older versions of Buildbot are available in the master/docs/relnotes/ directory of the source tree. Starting with version 0.8.6, they are also available under the appropriate version at http://buildbot.net/buildbot/docs.