Invalidate and rebuild builds for which recipies have changed

[kate]

If a recipe has changed, builds built under the old version of the recipe should be invalidated; they will need rebuilding.

This might be simple to accomplish by storing a hash of the recipe and using that to identify which builds are to be invalidated when the recipe is updated.

[mgood]

I don't think I agree with this. I've had to change the build recipe to accommodate changes in the build process, so the new recipe wouldn't work to rebuild old revisions, thus leading to false build failures. Can you provide some more information about the situation you're trying to address? Can you just invalidate the builds by hand to get them running on the new recipe?

[kate]

Yes, we could invalidate them by hand - but that's a lot of builds. I've been doing that by deleting rows from the database manually, so I can do so en-masse.

Maybe just indicating visually which builds were built under an outdated recipe might suffice: "WARNING: This build was built using an outdated build recipe". Then at least we could see which builds are suspect.

Our recipes don't change very often, but when they do, this is really tiresome. E.g. we added an extra step to run a different class of tests, recently, and there's no reason the older builds can't be run through those, too.

[osimons]

I agree with mgood. I don't think a recipe change should invalidate builds.

However, I can see the use why you would sometimes want to rebuild all/many old builds and Bitten should support a more rational interface for mass-invalidation. That however, is the the topic of #60 so I'm closing this as a duplicate.