[Python-Dev] building a module catalogue with buildbot

[Fredrik Lundh]

I've been playing with "automatic module discovery" in an attempt to figure
out how complete the library reference really is.

I've created a simple script that tweaks the path to get rid of site-package
stuff, and then scans the path for python modules and extensions, and writes
the result to a text file.  By combining module lists from different sources,
you can trivially generate all sorts of custom module indexes (e.g. modules
available on typical linux machines, modules not available in 2.5 on windows,
etc).  For some examples etc, see:

    http://effbot.org/lib/index-24.html
    http://effbot.org/lib/index-23.html
    http://effbot.org/lib/index-win32.html

    http://online.effbot.org/2006_01_01_archive.htm#20060110
    http://online.effbot.org/2006_01_01_archive.htm#module-count

Most importantly, this makes it easy to track down missing reference pages,
and generate stubs for pages that "should exist".

My initial thought was that we could ask alpha testers to run this script on
their alpha builds, and report back, but it just struck me that the "buildbot"
already builds stuff on a couple of interesting platforms.

Can buildbot deal with custom test/validation scripts, and collect the output
somewhere ?

</F>