[Python-Dev] Community buildbots and Python release quality metrics (original) (raw)

glyph at divmod.com glyph at divmod.com
Sun Jul 6 17:46:30 CEST 2008

On 01:02 am, grig.gheorghiu at gmail.com wrote:

To bring my $0.02 to this discussion: the Pybots 'community buildbots' turned out largely to be a failure.

Let's not say it's a failure. Let's instead say that it hasn't yet become a success :-).

I still haven't given up, and I hope this thread will spur project leaders into donating time, or resources, to the Pybots project. It has been my bitter observation about the Open Source world that people just LOVE to get stuff for free. As soon as you mention more involvement from them in the form of time, money, hardware resources, etc., the same brave proponents of cool things to be done are nowhere to be found.

I think this list is the wrong place to go to reach the people who need to be reached. It's python core developers and other people already involved in and aware of core development. That said I'm not sure what the right place is; I think your blog is syndicated on the unofficial planet python, so maybe that's a good place to start. Sadly, the right thing to do in terms of drumming up support is to get someone interested in PR and have them go to each project individually, but that might be more effort than setting up the buildbots themselves, at least initially...

However, let's say that this were tremendously successful, and lots of people start paying attention. I think pybots.org needs to be updated to say exactly what a participant interested in python testing needs to do, beyond "here's how you set up a buildbot" (a page that is actually a daunting-looking blog post which admits it may be somewhat outdated), because setting up a buildbot might not be the only thing that the project needs. It's one thing to tell people that they need to be helping out (and I'm sure you're right) but it's much more useful to get the message out that "we really need people to do X, Y, and Z". One thing I will definitely commit to is that if you make a "cry for help" page, I'll blog about it to drive attention to it, and I'll encourage the other, perhaps better-read Python bloggers I know to do so as well.

My personal interest at the moment is to get all of the irrelevant red off of the community builders page. Whether or not you believe in an XP "green bar" philosophy, the large number of spurious failures is distracting. Who is it that is capable of making appropriate changes? Is there something I could do to help with that? Note that I'm committing to say that I can do that, but, at least you could shut me up by making it my fault ;-).

(I'd also like to improve the labels of the build slaves. What exactly is "x86 Red Hat 9 trunk" testing? Trunk of what? What project?)

It would be good to remove the perception that it's somebody else's problem as much as possible. Right now, all these dead buildbots suggest to the various communities, "oh, I guess that guy who runs that buildbot needs to fix it". The dead bots should just be killed off, and their projects removed from the list, so that if someone wants to get involved and set up a bot for lxml, they're not put off of it by the fact that it might be rude to the guy who is currently (allegedly) running it.

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