Sfink's trychooser extension [1] has a curses ui for selecting try syntax. It's super handy, but the configuration tends to get out of date from reality. This was discussed a bit in bug 1101548. I think we can use mozci/allthethings.json to dynamically generate the configuration and update the curses ui on the fly. We should fix this in the trychooser extension first (so users of that benefit too), but I'd also like the curses ui in |mach try| as it's available by default, and works with both git and mercurial. [1] https://bitbucket.org/sfink/trychooser

For the record: I stole the trychooser curses UI from the crecord hg extension. I extracted it out and generalized it so that crecord and trychooser could share the curses stuff. I swear I sent the crecord changes back to the maintainer, though I had little hope that he'd accept them because it's a massive change for basically no benefit to crecord. If I'm not completely making this up, my memory is that he wasn't interested. (I looked for a pull request from me and did not see it. Nor can I find anything in my sent mail.) At any rate, I would love to have the curses stuff split out into a more general purpose library, and have done a bunch of work in that direction in the past. (It's all in the current trychooser, I don't have any private patches of interest.) I mostly stopped when I had it generalized enough for both trychooser and crecord, though there are still vestiges of crecord goop left in the trychooser code. Also, the tree management stuff is kind of hokey. The explicit call to thread the 'next' links through the tree nodes is stupid, for example. I guess the level of generalization I'm talking about isn't really what you care about, though. For what you want, having the code completely tailored to displaying categorized buildernames is fine.

There are plans to change how scheduling information is passed from a commit to taskcluster. The goal being not having to piggy-back off of try syntax to provide this information. While we could implement this now, it makes sense to wait for bug 126165 to land first. We can still borrow heavily from the trychooser extension, but we won't really be stealing it wholesale anymore.

I think that bug 1499822 is going to be better than this in most regards, so going to WONTFIX.