On 28/03/2015 09:51, Victor Stinner wrote:

Hi,

The buildbot x86 XP-4 3.x doesn't compile anymore since 3 months or more (maybe when Steve upgraded the Visual Studio project to VS 2015? I don't know).

Would it be possible to fix this buildbot, or to turn it off?

By the way, do we seriously want to support Windows XP? I mean, *who* will maintain it (no me sorry!). I saw recent changes to explicitly *drop* support for Windows older than Visa (stop using GetTickCount, always call GetTickCount64, for time.monotonic).

Per PEP 11, we track Microsoft lifecycle support, so we no longer support WinXP on 3.5 and newer. We do support XP on 3.4 and older, including 2.7. At least, that's my understanding. Given that, the only XP buildbot which makes sense is one running VS 2008 (2.7, 3.1, 3.2) or VS 2010 (3.3, 3.4). I think -- and I'm responding here to the wider set of emails Victor has just posted re failing buildbots -- that the difficulty with red buildbots is finding someone at the intersection of understanding the buildbot platform and understanding the code which has just broken it. (Or at least, having the wherewithal to come to understand both). And that someone might well not be the person who's hosting the buildbot: at its minimum they run up a VM and install the OS and the required tools. It's can be a way of offering help to the Python community without even being involved in core development at all. I concur with what Victor's touched on: that buildbots are not useful if they're always red. But finding the right person to turn them green is not necessarily easy. For myself I'm quite willing for someone to ping me with: "there's a Windows buildbot gone red; can you have a look?" But I have precious little time, and if the failure requires me to garner an understanding of a deep-level code change, a version-specific issue with the VS compiler, and some odd interaction with VM on which the buildbot is running, I'm unlikely to have enough time or energy to invest in it. Willing-but-not-always-able-ly-yours, TJG

Victor Stinner <victor.stinner@gmail.com> writes:

Would it be possible to fix this buildbot, or to turn it off? (...) By the way, do we seriously want to support Windows XP? I mean, *who* will maintain it (no me sorry!). I saw recent changes to explicitly *drop* support for Windows older than Visa (stop using GetTickCount, always call GetTickCount64, for time.monotonic).

Disabling the 3.x branch (or 3.5+ going forward) on the XP buildbot seems plausible to me, assuming the issue is unlikely to be fixed (or someone found with time to look into it). If, as Tim suggests in his response, 3.5+ need not be officially supported on XP anyway, it may not be worth much effort to address. At some point (such as switching to VS 2015), we aren't going to be able to compile newer releases under XP anyway. I'm assuming you aren't suggesting turning off the XP buildbot entirely, correct? As long as any fixes are still getting applied to 2.x or earlier 3.x releases, I do think having a buildbot covering those branches for XP would be useful, if only to catch possible issues in back-ported fixes. There's still an amazing number of XP systems in service. While I doubt very many of those running XP also need the latest 3.x release of Python, I expect there are quite a few active 2.x users. -- David