On 04:31 pm, ctb@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?
Others have made similar offers.
I'll similarly encourage them to take action, then. Do you happen to remember who?
The architectures supported by the cloud services don't really add anything (and generally don't have Mac OS X support, AFAIK).
That's not entirely accurate. Currently, CPython has slaves on these platforms: - x86 - FreeBSD - Windows XP - Gentoo Linux - OS X - ia64 - Ubuntu Linux - Alpha - Debian Linux So, assuming we don't want to introduce any new OS, Amazon could fill in the following holes: - x86 - Ubuntu Linux - ia64 - FreeBSD - Windows XP - Gentoo Linux So very modestly, that's 4 currently missing slaves which Amazon's cloud service *does* add. It's easy to imagine further additions it could make as well.
What we really need (IMO) is someone to dig into the tests to figure out which tests fail randomly and why, and to fix them on specific architectures that most of us don't personally use. This is hard work that is neither glamorous nor popular.
Sure. That's certainly necessary. I don't think anyone is suggesting that it's not. Fortunately, adding more build slaves is not mutually exclusive with a developer fixing bugs in CPython.
I think the idea of paying a dedicated developer to make the CPython+buildbot tests reliable is better, although I would still be -0 on it (I don't think the PSF should be paying for this kind of thing at all).
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. Jean-Paul