BuildStream as a Library

[Benjamin Schubert <ben c schubert gmail com>]

Hey Everyone,

We were wondering if BuildStream is or will ever be considered as usable as a
Library? Do you provide a stable API other than plugins and config files,
or would it be possible to help design an API that could be used by another
python program.

Let me explain our use case and why we think that would be beneficial:

We are creating a tool that automates the creation of related pull requests
accross BuildStream workspaces. In order to get the needed information
(Opened workspaces, remote urls, tracking branches, etc) we currently
need to invoke `bst` quite often and load some of the bst files.

This means that we duplicate some work compared to what BuildStream already
has done. Moreover, we are not sure our parsing is correct, since BuildStream
configuration parsing is quite complex.

We would like to be able to avoid that by including directly BuildStream as a
library in our code, but we need to know if that would be a use case supported
and which parts of BuildStream would be part of this API.

For our use case, having only the yaml loading and dumping would be enough as
a start.

Best,

Benjamin