[Python-Dev] Possible language summit topic: buildbots (original) (raw)

Antoine Pitrou solipsis at pitrou.net
Fri Oct 30 17:41:39 CET 2009

Le vendredi 30 octobre 2009 à 09:31 -0700, C. Titus Brown a écrit :

[ ... ]

I'm happy to provide VMs or shell access for Windows (XP, Vista, 7); Linux ia64; Linux x86; and Mac OS X. Others have made similar offers. The architectures supported by the cloud services don't really add anything (and generally don't have Mac OS X support, AFAIK).

Well these VMs would have to run buildslaves on them, then. Are you ready to host some and connect them to the current buildbot infrastructure? (VMs without buildslaves are less interesting IMO)

What we really need (IMO) is someone to dig into the tests to figure out which tests fail randomly and why, and to fix them on specific architectures that most of us don't personally use. This is hard work that is neither glamorous nor popular.

I'm sure some of us are ready to do so (*). The situation has already improved quite a lot in the recent times. But fixing platform- or, worse, setup-specific issues often requires shell access to the target system, otherwise you spend too much time trying fixes on the SVN and waiting for the buildbot to react.

(*) After all, if we weren't, we wouldn't even care about buildbots, we'd be content with running the test suite on our own machines

I think the idea of paying a dedicated developer to make the CPython+buildbot tests reliable is better, although I would still be -0 on it (I don't think the PSF should be paying for this kind of thing at all).

Paying developers in volunteer communities is always more contentious than paying for other kinds of resources. (It's generally more expensive too)

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