[Python-Dev] Automated Python testing (was Re: status of development documentation) (original) (raw)

Brett Cannon bcannon at gmail.com
Sun Dec 25 21:23:59 CET 2005

On 12/25/05, Tim Peters <tim.peters at gmail.com> wrote:

Take a look at:

http://buildbot.zope.org/ That runs code from: http://buildbot.sourceforge.net/ Someone sets up a "buildbot master" (that's what the Zope URL points at), and then any number of people can volunteer to set up their boxes as "buildbot slaves".

As in some machine I might personally have left on? That would require a static IP which I don't know how common that will be. But then again I am willing to bet that the Python community is big enough that people who do have machines that are idle enough that we should be able to get good coverage. Wonder if we would have to worry about result pollution from someone who thought it was funny to send in false negatives?

From time to time the buildbot master asks the slaves to do the checkout/build/test dance (or any other code dance you like), the slaves report results back to the master, and the master displays the slaves' results.

If you look at the 2nd-leftmost column, you can see that the master knows when checkins have been done. Checkins can trigger asking the slaves to run tests, and if the tests fail on some slave the master can send email saying so, including the list of checkins ("the blamelist") done since the last time that slave ran tests: The guilty developer can be identified and harassed without human intervention. :-) This really helps at Zope Corp. One downside is that we seem unable to get an in-house Windows buildbot slave to work reliably, and so far don't even know whether that's because of Windows, the buildbot code, or flakiness in our internal network. It seems quite reliable on Linux, though.

Well, it is written in Python so someone here should either be able to fix it or properly blame it on Windows. =)

The idea of the PSF paying to have some machines set up to run consistent tests has come up multiple times. I know Neal has said he would be willing to host the machines at his house before (but I think this may have been before his relocation to California). This whole situation of going two months without knowing that a major platform is broken shows that this is a real problem and ignoring it is probably not a good thing. =)

If we ask for volunteer machines we could offer to put up company or personal names on the buildbot page of those who have volunteered CPU cycles. I am sure that will help motivate companies and people to install the software on a spare machine. Heck, I would have no problem giving a specific company sole sponsorship kudos if they gave us boxes that covered enough core operating systems.

Maybe this is something to bring up at the PSF meeting and to hash out at the sprints?

-Brett

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