[Python-Dev] Windows (original) (raw)

Paul Moore p.f.moore at gmail.com
Wed Aug 4 17:25:38 CEST 2010

On 4 August 2010 08:49, Tim Golden <mail at timgolden.me.uk> wrote:

I have watched the buildbot pages occasionally, especially when I see Windows-related commits going in, but several times "red" buildbots have turned out to be -- apparently -- environmental / local issues unrelated to commits. Obviously I could/should have contacted the buildbot owner to at least inform him or her that something was amiss. But somehow at that point one's technical enthusiasm for fixing a problem diminishes when it's not clear that there is a problem. (Grumble, grumble, mutter, mutter... :) )

I agree that having a buildbot of your own to administer tends to encourage you to be more aware of issues - it certainly did for me. However, from my own experience, the Windows buildbot environment is fairly flaky, and I spend far too much time killing "stuck" python processes and VS JIT debugger processes, rather than actually usefully debugging real issues. (And I don't know of any way of finding out where the stuck processes came from or what they were doing at the time that they got stuck, so all I can do is kill them...)

I don't have any Windows sysadmin experience, so I struggle to fix these types of problem, and doing so often takes up all the time that would otherwise go to areas where I could do some good, digging into genuine issues :-(

I don't really have any answer to this problem right now. Is it possible to set up a local buildslave-like environment (so I can run the test suite on my development PC without needing to set up access and register that PC as a temporary buildslave, which wouldn't be practical for me)? If I can get an environment where I can run the tests as I need and debug them in place, I might be able to work on improving the reliability of things.

Paul.

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