[Python-Dev] Possible language summit topic: buildbots

[C. Titus Brown]

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.  Others have made similar offers.  The
architectures supported by the cloud services don't really add anything
(and generally don't have Mac OS X support, AFAIK).

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.

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).

cheers,
--titus
-- 
C. Titus Brown, ctb at msu.edu