[Python-Dev] Snakebite, buildbot and low hanging fruit -- feedback wanted! (Was Re: SSH access against buildbot boxes) (original) (raw)

C. Titus Brown ctb at msu.edu
Mon Nov 8 03:58:56 CET 2010

On Sun, Nov 07, 2010 at 09:32:33PM -0500, Scott Dial wrote:

On 11/7/2010 7:09 PM, Martin v. L?wis wrote: >> Luckily, the problems that we faced 2.5 years ago when I came up with >> the idea of Snakebite are still just as ever present today ;-) > > Is this bashing of existing infrastructure really necessary? > People (like me) might start bashing about vaporware and how > a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. Cooperate, don't > confront.

+1 Respect your (software) elders. The Snaketbite rhetoric has always been less than generous with regard to Buildbot, but Buildbot has been providing an infinitely more useful service to the community for much longer than Snakebite has for those 2.5 years.

Yes, yes, I agree that some graciousness is a good idea.

Oh, wait... you're not helping.

Anyway, I think buildbot is a good local optimum for python-dev, largely because it's maintained by someone who cares enough to do it well. And, if Trent had been talking about buildbot only, MvL's comment would be more than fair. But Trent, and I, and others, have talked about quite a bit more than buildbot being "the" problem. Things like enabling and maintaining easy EC2 spin-up with buildbot, or providing SSH key access, or making a 'try' server available and maintaining it, would be clearly beneficial. And that's some of what Trent has been talking about providing. It turns out it's hard to do without lots and lots of time and money. If you truly think it's not useful, I'd be interested in hearing your opinions, because we've spent an ungodly amount of the above on it.

In the larger context, I worry very much that we're settling for a rather suboptimal support setup (on svn, and on cont integration, and on some other aspects of Python infrastructure) because the current maintainers are so overloaded and few others are stepping up to bear burdens. This is a big concern of at least some people in the PSF. But it's not an easy problem to solve - quelle surprise. And I'm not in a personal position to help, so I've basically tried to shut up about it :).

As for buildbot, I've been pretty hard on buildbot myself, and I'm happy to justify it to others -- I've done so in public fora so I'm sure you can find the records, if you care to look. But it's not really very relevant to this conversation, especially since Trent has always been interested in building off the buildbot setup rather than replacing it.

--titus

C. Titus Brown, ctb at msu.edu

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