Would it be worth spending some time discussing the buildbot situation at the PyCon 2010 language summit? In the past, I've found the buildbots to be an incredibly valuable resource; especially when working with aspects of Python or C that tend to vary significantly from platform to platform (for me, this usually means floating-point, and platform math libraries, but there are surely many other things it applies to). But more recently there seem to have been some difficulties keeping a reasonable number of buildbots up and running. A secondary problem is that it can be awkward to debug some of the more obscure test failures on buildbots without having direct access to the machine. From conversations on IRC, I don't think I'm alone in wanting to find ways to make the buildbots more useful. So the question is: how best to invest time and possibly money to improve the buildbot situation (and as a result, I hope, improve the quality of Python)? What could be done to make maintenance of build slaves easier? Or to encourage interested third parties to donate hardware and time? Are there good alternatives to Buildbot that might make a difference? What do other projects do? These are probably the wrong questions; I'm hoping that a discussion would help produce the right questions, and possibly some answers. Mark