Re: [Python-Dev] Daily DMG builds

Ned Deily writes:

In article <20121001211812.4c40aa52@pitrou.net>, Antoine Pitrou wrote:

...

Hello,

It seems that the daily DMG builds have been failing for some time on the default branch: http://buildbot.python.org/daily-dmg/

Since there has been no report or complaint about that, should we just stop producing those builds?

It's failing on a checksum error of the cached download ncurses tarball which is kind of odd. I've pinged David about it.

Ned's email got to me before I got to the list today - the initial issue does appear to be a bad ncurses external download from a while back. The download was Aug 6 so that seems to match when the 3.x dmg stopped being produced. I flushed that and let it grab a new copy. The 3.3 branch then had a separate issue since it was brand new and the Python-ast.[ch] rebuild process doesn't work right under 10.4, but touching the files included in hg resolves that. (If I recall it's because it uses the system python which is ancient - I had done the same fix a while back for the 3.x builder). So I believe things should be ok at this point, or at least back to the way they were previously.

I must admit I don't pay attention to the dmg buildbot but I probably should.

I know I try to catch slave-related failures, but staying on top of all of the builders can be a little tough. I don't think there's a good summary page for the slaves I want to follow, so it's tricky to stay current (plus the trunk stuff tends to have more transient failures). Not sure if there's a way to have per-owner summary pages or anything on the build master. I do use the main build slaves summary page for overall status, but scanning the individual builders is 30+ other pages (the per-slave pages don't often have enough history to cover all the builders), or trying to find each of my builders in the overall waterfall page. Neither approach tends to survive very long in terms of my regularly doing it :-) Anyway, I always welcome (and appreciate) any head's up for failures that seem to be slave-related...

I know at least one person (Raymond) has reported using the dmg builds regularly and the 2.7 builds are still going. There is a bit of an issue now for 3.3 and default: the buildbot-slave is apparently running OS X 10.4 so it is no longer capable of building either of the two installer variants that we release on python.org (one now requires at least 10.5 and the other at least 10.6). However, we don't want to break anything on 10.4, if possible, and the installers still work on later systems so there is some value in producing them - as long as someone is paying attention when they break and, hopefully, someone uses them.

It's been a few years since setting this up, but at least at one point I think it was safer to build an installer on the older platform in terms of compatibility, but it wouldn't surprise me if that process has become dated, or no longer necessary. In fact, if I recall correctly, I think Ronald was already using a later platform for his own building when the daily buildbot was set up. At the time I needed a 10.4 platform for local application building (I had an app supporting 10.4 clients and couldn't build it on a later OSX and still have it install on older systems), but it was otherwise idle so available as a buildbot. The physical machine is unlikely to get upgraded beyond 10.4 though. It's never been entirely clear how useful the daily build slaves are. We used to do daily Windows builds too but when they ran into some problems the demand (or lack thereof) didn't seem to justify the time to troubleshoot so they were discontinued. My guess is the same will probably happen to the OSX daily build slave once it hits something difficult to troubleshoot/fix. Although until it does I suppose there's no need to explicitly turn it off. It would still be interesting to know who may still be making use of the images being produced. -- David