[python-committers] Visual Studio Team Services checks on pullrequests (original) (raw)

Steve Dower steve.dower at python.org
Thu May 17 10:07:44 EDT 2018

Okay, now that it's morning and I have coffee, here's a full update on what I've been doing (those at the language summit have heard some of this already).

Visual Studio Team Services is Microsoft's integrated code/build/release infrastructure service. The official marketing page is https://www.visualstudio.com/team-services/ but you can think of it as github code+github issues+Travis but engineered for huge teams (i.e. Microsoft keeps all of Windows in git, all the millions of issues they have, and all the builds they do, are in VSTS and it scales to thousands of developers just fine).

I've been working with the team to improve their Python support and generally raise awareness of the new service, and one of the things they agreed to is to provide a free set of build machines for CPython. These allow us to run up to 20 simultaneous Windows, macOS and Linux builds with no other limits.

My main project at the PyCon US sprints has been setting these builds up. As of about 16 hours ago the PR builds are now hooked up to github (for an example, see https://github.com/python/cpython/pull/6933). They are not required to merge, so don't feel the need to block PRs if everything else passes, but we'd like to fix up the issues they are hitting. As far as I can tell, most of the problems are transient test failures that ought to be fixed anyway.

Brief interruption for some links:

Authentication for python.visualstudio.com is currently manually managed, but everything relevant under https://python.visualstudio.com/cpython is visible without authentication (this is a new VSTS feature that we got enabled early). Right now I don't want to add lots of people manually, and we'll be looking at how to make this simpler in the future. There isn't much you can do while logged in anyway :)

There are some missing features. I'm still in contact with the team and I'll be passing along requests, so feel free to let me know if you need anything. Currently I'm aware of:

We don't yet have a specific timeline for making VSTS builds required and reducing Travis/AppVeyor usage. I also haven't set up VSTS for Python 2.7, and honestly I'm fine with keeping the existing systems there. As a slight aside, we're also working with some other projects to provide similar setups (specifically Twisted and some PyPA-associated projects), so if you think you'd benefit from this on one of your other projects let me know and we can see what's available.

Also, if you start evaluating/using VSTS for other projects because of this, please let me know. New users is what the VSTS team is trying to achieve, so every time I can send back positive reports it helps convince them to keep donating build time.

Feel free to email me with any questions or feedback, either on or off-list.

Cheers, Steve

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