On Thu, Feb 16, 2017 at 8:45 AM, Matthew Brett <matthew.brett@gmail.com> wrote:

On Wed, Feb 15, 2017 at 7:37 PM, Ralf Gommers <ralf.gommers@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Thu, Feb 16, 2017 at 8:02 AM, Matthew Brett <matthew.brett@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> Hey,
>>
>> A recent post to the wheel-builders mailing list pointed out some
>> links to places providing free PowerPC hosting for open source
>> projects, if they agree to a submitted request:
>>
>> https://mail.python.org/pipermail/wheel-builders/2017-February/000257.html
>>
>> It would be good to get some testing going on these architectures.
>> Shall we apply for hosting, as the numpy organization?
>
>
> Those are bare VMs it seems. Remembering the Buildbot and Mailman horrors, I
> think we should be very reluctant to taking responsibility for maintaining
> CI on anything that's not hosted and can be controlled with a simple config
> file in our repo.

Not sure what you mean about mailman - maybe the Enthought servers we
didn't have access to?

We did have access (for most of the time), it's just that no one is interested in putting in lots of hours on sysadmin duties.

For buildbot, I've been maintaining about 12
crappy old machines for about 7 years now [1] - I'm happy to do the
same job for a couple of properly hosted PPC machines.

That's awesome persistence. The NumPy and SciPy buildbots certainly weren't maintained like that, half of them were offline or broken for long periods usually.

At least we'd
have some way of testing for these machines, if we get stuck - even if
that involved spinning up a VM and installing the stuff we needed from
the command line.

I do see the value of testing on more platforms of course. It's just about logistics/responsibilities. If you're saying that you'll do the maintenance, and want to apply for resources using the NumPy name, that's much better I think then making "the numpy devs" collectively responsible.

Ralf