Pass ad hoc job parameters

[gilles-peskine-arm]

I would like to have a low-effort way to set certain parameters when triggering a CI build manually, such that:

• The parameter names don't need to be registered first (e.g. no editing of the Jenkins configuration, or of the code in mbedtls-test if the parameter only has an effect on code that's in the mbedtls repository).
• The parameter values are specific, not committed into the mbedtls or mbedtls-test repository.

My immediate use case is: I want to see which test certificates will expire in a certain time period, so I want to run a test campaign with faketime chosen_delay around running tests. I've patched all.sh to add a new command line option or react to an environment variable — now what? How do I pass the “call faketime” flag and the chosen_delay value? What I've done for now is to make a once-off branch of mbedtls that always enables the use of faketime and hard-codes a delay. But I'd like to upstream the code to optionally run faketime, without enabling it by default, but keeping an easy way to manually run a job in faketime mode.

Adding a FAKETIME string parameter to the interface for starting the mbedtls-release-new job would be a solution, but that's more work than I'd like for each similar use case.

The general intent is to run some “unusual” testing in a convenient way. I think this could be useful more generally, for example to enable additional debugging or performance measurements.

The interface I'd like is: on the Jenkins interface for starting mbedtls-release-new, I can assign string values to arbitrary variables. The variable names should have some forced prefix to avoid accidentally or maliciously perturbing the execution of the CI — I do not want this to allow setting PATH or some such). The assignments will be in the environment when running all.sh (and perhaps Windows).