On Apr 14, 2010, at 06:39 AM, C. Titus Brown wrote:
Separately, I'd be happy to put forward a proposal to the PSF to fund RMs and their lieutenants with a Mac or a PC, whichever they needed to keep things moving. It's the least "we" can do, IMO, and hardware is just not that expensive compared to the dedication of the volunteers. If Georg, Benjamin, Martin, or Ronald are interested, please just tell me (or Steve, or the PSF board, or ...) what you want and I'll work on getting it funded.
While I appreciate the offer, I don't think this is as useful as it could be. Speaking as an RM, I would happily build all three releases (source tarballs, Windows installers and Mac disk images) if I had easy access to the necessary machines and environments over the 'net, and precise instructions on how to do the builds. Ideally, those instructions would be "run this script" or even rolled into the current release.py script that is used to build the tarballs. I have Macs and a Windows machine. The Windows machine is not easily accessible as it's a dual-boot with Ubuntu. As stated previously, the difficult part is getting all the necessary dependencies in place and the expertise to know the steps that are required to build. A network accessible machine for Mac and Windows, where other experts such as Martin and Roland can help maintain and configure, would be ideal. That way, and of the platform experts or RM could push a button and build the installers. -Barry