[Python-Dev] Automatic installer builds (was Re: Fwd: Broken link to download (Mac OS X))

["Martin v. Löwis"]

> Keeping the knowledge in the makefile or script in the source tree would
> let the rules change across branches without affecting the build master.
> Though if having more specific rules in the master was easier, I'd be
> fine with that too.

Intuitively, I find the set of batch files used for Windows "ugly"
(despite me having created them in the first place). Objectively, I
think that has the risk of getting "out of hands", in the sense that
people start to think that they have to use these scripts in order to
build Python on Mac. This actually happened on Windows - some people now
recommend to run the buildbot scripts on a regular developer checkout,
because they supposedly do the right things.

I would rather prefer to have the buildbot run the same commands that we
recommend developers to run. The knowledge about these should be in the
README, and it should be stable knowledge, i.e. require infrequent
changes. This is true for Unix: configure/make/make test/make clean
had been the correct procedure for ten years now. The Unix buildbot only
deviates slightly, to have the slaves run a more expensive version of
the test suite.

> Agreed, thus my caveat as to the output of the build-installer script
> in fact being what has been published for downloads.  In my brief
> tests it looks like it created a production DMG ready for publishing
> on the download page, and did in fact install correctly, but I'm still
> new to the Mac binary building process.

I'd be interested in setting up daily builds then. For these, I think
it's fine that they may differ slightly from the official binaries -
people would recognize that they are testing a different set of binaries.

> Of course, this is just the DMG construction.  Not sure what amount of
> "test the installer" testing should be required prior to publication.

If it's fully automated, the amount of testing may actually be small,
IMO. I personally would put timeliness over correctness here. Also, it
might be that we can sign up some volunteer to do a smoke test in a
timely manner at release time who will test the installer on, say, a
clean VM.

Regards,
Martin