I recently added functionality to Launchpad so that you can retry and re-score builds via the webservice API.  This was the number one requested API feature from PPA users and Ubuntu packagers alike!

It’s trivial to use:

>>> ubuntu = launchpad.distributions['ubuntu']
>>> main_archive = ubuntu.main_archive
>>> sources = main_archive.getPublishedSources(source_name='my_package_name')
>>> builds = sources[0].getBuilds()
>>> for build in builds:
...     build.rescore(score=1000)
...     build.retry()

`rescore` requires that you have buildd admin privileges.   `retry` simply requires that you have permission to upload the source.

A more advanced example is to fetch all builds that are failed in a series:

>>> karmic = ubuntu.getSeries(name_or_version="karmic")
>>> failed_states = (
...     'Failed to build',
...     'Dependency wait',
...     'Chroot problem',
...     'Failed to upload',
...     )
>>> builds = []
>>> for build_state in failed_states:
...     builds.extend(
...         karmic.getBuildRecords(build_state=build_state))

This will potentially return builds that are superseded so they need to be filtered to see if the build’s source is published.  This is something we’re going to fix soon, so that you can specify that you only want builds with published sources in the getBuildRecords() call.