Provide a collective way to centralise recipies

[kate]

We have automated builds for lots of components of our product; each component uses the same recipe. It would be helpful if we could centralise these, and also to centralise the platforms for which they build. It is very tedious to manually cut & paste this for every component we have.

Storing recipes in subversion might also be helpful, if a path to an XML file may be given instead of storing the recipe in SQL.

[kate]

An alternate way to provide the same functionality might be to add a "parametrisable" concept to recipes; a list of values is registered somewhere (these might be part of paths: /a/trunk, /b/trunk, /c/trunk for example).

Those values would be substituted into the recipe along with the various other variable substitutions.

A recipe would then appear multiple times in the Build Status; once for each of those values. This would be simple to implement using SQL VIEWs; each "virtual recipe" is just a VIEW to the real thing, with that parameter substituted.

[kate]

We've ended up doing this by having the build recipe svn export a shell script, and the shell script does all the work. Horrible!

I think the parametrisable idea would work nicely, especially given that other parameters (e.g. the path) already exist.

[osimons]

I think all the requested needs can be handled using configuration already. The configuration information may not have been easily accessible, but I've now made it part of default documentation: Documentation/configure.html. Please review that documentation, and reopen ticket if there is something I've misunderstood or not quite covered by current configuration handling.

As for storing recipes elsewhere (#301) and possibly using xinclude in recipes for more flexible reuse (#230), I'll leave those other specific tickets to handle that particular request.