Ref T1049. Allows external systems to send a message to a build target. The primary intended use case is:
- You make an HTTP request to Jenkins.
- The build goes into a "waiting" state.
- Later, Jenkins calls harbormaster.sendmessage to report that the target passed or failed.
- The build continues as appropriate.
This is deceptively complicated because:
- There are a lot of race concerns. We might get a message back from an external system before it even responds to the request we made. We want to make sure we process these messages no matter when we receive them.
- These messages need to be sent to a build target (vs a build or buildable) because we'll get into trouble with parallelization later on otherwise (Jenkins is told to do 3 builds; we can't tell which ones failed or what overall state is unless the message are sent to targets).
- I initially thought about implementing this as a separate "Wait for a response from an external system" build step. This gets a lot more complicated for users once we do parallelization, though. Particularly, in the case where you've told Jenkins to do 3 builds, the three "wait" steps need to know which target they're waiting for (and jenkins needs to know some unique identifier for each target). So this pretty much boils down to a more complicated, more error-prone version of using target PHIDs.
This makes the already-muddy Build UI a bit worse, but it needs a general clarity pass anyway (it's showing way too much uninteresting data, and should show a better summary of results instead).