twisted-infra/twisted-buildbot-configuration — pull request #7 by adiroiban (2014-12-04 12:01:44+00:00)
Title: Add step which automatically updates project dependencies

Problem
======

When a new dependency is added to Twisted, or when a newer version is required there is no way to run the patch/branch with buildbot as buildbot has an external way to update the packages.

Also, if you end up with 2 branches (master and ticket-branch) each strictly depending on a version, upgrading the dependency for the ticket-branch will break test on master.... and then if you want to re-run tests for an older commit... tests will break again.

Changes
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A step was added for all builders which will call pip install --upgrade with a predefined buildbot-requirements.txt

A local cache is used to reduce network traffic.

This is just an initial code to start the conversation.

Limitations
========

The current step directly uses pip and only support installing source packages.

Instead of directly calling pip, we can also call `python dependencies.py` and then each repo can implement its own way of installing/updating the dependencies.

The current step requires all repositories to have a buildbot-requirements.txt file, it can be change to skip the step if a requirements / dependencies.py file is not present in the repository.

I went for pip... as it is much easier... but maybe we should go for dependencies.py so that we can also install binary packages.