2009/10/30 C. Titus Brown <ctb@msu.edu>:
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. 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).
As Antione pointed out, it's not clear (at least, it isn't to me) what that leaves to be done. As a counter-offer: Given remote access to however many Windows VMs you want to provide, I'll get them up and running with buildslaves on them. If that requires software such as Visual Studio, I have copies via the MSDN licenses that I am happy to provide. Once things are up and running, I'll be prepared to do basic care and feeding of the buildslave, but as my time is limited, it would be nice if others would pitch in to help. In other words, if it's setup effort that's lacking, I'll provide it. As long as someone else can cover systems admin, and we get some level of volunteers to cover ongoing support, that should give us better Windows coverage on the buildbots. Paul.