[Python-Dev] Community buildbots and Python release quality metrics

[Grig Gheorghiu]

On Thu, Jun 26, 2008 at 8:18 AM,  <glyph at divmod.com> wrote:
> Today on planetpython.org, Doug Hellman announced the June issue of Python
> magazine.  The cover story this month is about Pybots, "the fantastic
> automation system that has been put in place to make sure new releases of
> Python software are as robust and stable as possible".
>
> Last week, there was a "beta" release of Python which, according to the
> community buildbots, cannot run any existing python software.  Normally I'd
> be complaining here about Twisted, but in fact Twisted is doing relatively
> well right now; only 80 failing tests.  Django apparently cannot even be
> imported.
>
> The community buildbots have been in a broken state for months now[1]. I've
> been restraining myself from whinging about this, but now that it's getting
> close to release, it's time to get these into shape, or it's time to get rid
> of them.

Hi all,

Sorry for not replying sooner, I was on vacation when this thread
started and I only got back in town yesterday.

To bring my $0.02 to this discussion: the Pybots 'community buildbots'
turned out largely to be a failure. Why? Because there was never
really a 'community' around it, especially a community of project
leaders who would be interested in the state of their projects' tests.
All the machines donated for the Pybots farm belong to people who just
happen to be interested in given projects, but are not really the
leaders of those projects. The only project who constantly stayed on
top of the buildbot status was Twisted, represented by JP Calderone
(although even there the tests were running on my machine, and not on
a machine contributed by the Twisted folks.)

I still haven't given up, and I hope this thread will spur project
leaders into donating time, or resources, to the Pybots project. It
has been my bitter observation about the Open Source world that people
just LOVE to get stuff for free. As soon as you mention more
involvement from them in the form of time, money, hardware resources,
etc., the same brave proponents of cool things to be done are nowhere
to be found.

To come back to this thread, I don't think it's reasonable to expect
the Python core developers to be that interested in the status of the
community buildbots. It is again up to the project leaders to step up
to the plate, donate machines to Pybots, and stay on top of any
breakages that result from Python core checkins. It seems to me that
the Python core developers have always responded promptly and
favorably to reports of breakages coming from the Pybots farm.

Grig