Please support running arbitrary commands

[GrahamCobb]

It would be very useful if sbdmock supported running arbitrary commands as an alternative to processing a .dsc file. If that was possible, I could throw away my home-created scripts for my overnight daily builds which create and initialise new targets (with horrible logic which parse the SDK name to work out all the right options). I much prefer your config-file architecture.

Unfortunately these builds are what create the .dsc file in the first place and they use MUD and various other scripts to control what source file versions they fetch from svn and building multiple packages in the right order. If sbdmock provided an option to execute an arbitrary command line then I could at least take out the creation of the scratchbox build environment from my scripts.

If you wish, I could have a go at creating a patch.

[GrahamCobb]

I have created a patch which adds a "-c" option which causes sbdmock to interpret the arguments as a shell command to be passed to scratchbox instead of building a package.

I have put the patch on the wiki as http://wiki.github.com/kad/sbdmock/patch-sbdmock-shell-command

[kad]

can you provide your usecase if this would be implemented ?
e.g. I'd like to see what kind of commands you'll be using.

[GrahamCobb]

[Sent this reply as a private message but realised it should be a comment...]

Anything.

In my case it is my build scripts. These do things like fetching the latest content from SVN, working out the version numbers to use to reflect that, building in the right order so that build dependencies are satisfied, working out whether all the builds succeeded, copying them to a repository, etc, etc.

This is running every night doing daily builds for 3 different application suites (GPE -- 29 packages, OpenSync -- 15 packages and Xsisusb -- 4 packages) with my patched version of sbdmock.

Other people may have other requirements. A common one will be to use MUD to do the build, or other build tools.

Sbdmock provides a clean environment to do any builds -- it shouldn't be limited to invoking dpkg-buildpackage. Other people may even have ideas beyond just builds (I am wondering whether I can use it for some testing -- at least installation testing).

[kad]

I'm thinking about having concept of specialized tools.

So, for example things like svn checkouts should be done outside of the builder tool as this might require special needs in every case.

After reading your first issue description I was thinking to implement possibility to accept directory with extracted source of package in additional to dsc+tgz. In that scenario, you can have any kind of your script to prepare source directory, and afterwards invoke sbdmock with source directory as argument to initiate build.

will that satisfy you, or you'd like to execute some commands in-between steps ?
e.g. after environment is prepared but dpkg-buildpackage is not yet started ?