[Python-Dev] Cloud build slaves (was Re: Possible language summit topic: buildbots)

[C. Titus Brown]

On Fri, Oct 30, 2009 at 04:58:29PM -0000, exarkun at twistedmatrix.com wrote:
> On 04:31 pm, ctb at msu.edu wrote:
>> On Fri, Oct 30, 2009 at 04:21:06PM +0000, Antoine Pitrou wrote:
>>>
>>> Hello,
>>>
>>> Sorry for the little redundancy, I would like to underline Jean-Paul's
>>> suggestion here:
>>>
>>> Le Sun, 25 Oct 2009 14:05:12 +0000, exarkun a ??crit??:
>>> > I think that money can help in two ways in this case.
>>> >
>>> > First, there are now a multitude of cloud hosting providers which  
>>> will
>>> > operate a slave machine for you.  BuildBot has even begun to support
>>> > this deployment use-case by allowing you to start up and shut down  
>>> vms
>>> > on demand to save on costs.  Amazon's EC2 service is supported out  
>>> of
>>> > the box in the latest release.
>>>
>>> I'm not a PSF member, but it seems to me that the PSF could ask Amazon
>>> (or any other virtual machine business anyway) to donate a small  
>>> number
>>> of permanent EC2 instances in order to run buildslaves on.
>>
>> [ ... ]
>>
>> I'm happy to provide VMs or shell access for Windows (XP, Vista, 7);  
>> Linux
>> ia64; Linux x86; and Mac OS X.
>
> Okay, let's move on this.  Martin has, I believe, said that potential  
> slave operators only need to contact him to get credentials for new  
> slaves.  Can you make sure to follow up with him to get slaves running  
> on these machines?  Or would you rather give out access to someone else  
> and have them do the build slave setup?

I think we crossed threads here; I can provide the VMs, and access to them,
but I won't (empirically, don't have the regular time available to ;) maintain
buildbot buildslaves.

You or Antoine or others are welcome to contact me off-list.  Just give me an
account name and ssh key, and I'll give you login access via tunneled Remote
Desktop to the Windows machines.

>> Others have made similar offers.
>
> I'll similarly encourage them to take action, then.  Do you happen to  
> remember who?

Every few months this thread seems to pop up and then fizzles when people
realize the level of work and attention involved (<- he says cynically) in
exploiting the offer of resources; I hope that anyone interested in
offering resources will pop their head up again to look around.

> I hope everyone is on board with the idea of fixing bugs in CPython,  
> either in the actual implementation of features or in the tests for  
> those features.  That being the case, the discussion of whether or not  
> the PSF should try to fund such a task is perhaps best discussed on the  
> PSF members list.

Sure.

--titus
-- 
C. Titus Brown, ctb at msu.edu