[Python-Dev] thinking about 2.7

[David Bolen]

exarkun at twistedmatrix.com writes:

> It's easy for someone to volunteer to set up a new slave.  It's even
> easy to make sure it keeps running for 6 months.  But it's not as easy
> to keep it running indefinitely.  This isn't about the software
> involved (at least not entirely).  It's about someone paying attention
> to whether the slave restarts on reboots, and about paying attention
> to whether the slave host has lots its network connection, or been
> decomissioned, or whether a system upgrade disabled the slave, or
> whatever other random administrative-like tasks are necessary to keep
> things running.  Casual volunteers generally just won't keep up with
> these tasks.

One suggestion from my perspective as a buildbot maintainer who, IMHO,
has maintained generally stable and fairly well monitored buildbots
(XP-4 and FreeBSD) for a while now....

I don't know if it's possible but it would be great if the buildbot
master could send an email to a buildbot maintainer if it thinks a
buildbot is down.  There have actually been times in the past when
from the perspective of my buildbot things were just dandy, but the
master showed it as down.  Stopping and restarting the buildbot,
forcing it to reconnect, cleaned things up, but I have to monitor the
web status page which is a manual process.

And since it's the master's perspective that really matters when it
comes to a buildbot being available, getting status from the master
would be very helpful.

-- David