[Python-Dev] Looking after the buildbots (in general)

[Steve Holden]

On 8/4/2010 6:08 AM, Nick Coghlan wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 4, 2010 at 7:42 PM, Dirkjan Ochtman <dirkjan at ochtman.nl> wrote:
>> On Wed, Aug 4, 2010 at 11:16, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:
>>> I would advocate a system were people are encouraged to take
>>> responsibility of the problems they introduce when committing changes.
>>> Of course, there are sometimes situations where it's not possible
>>> (triggering platform-specific oddities, for example).
>>
>> They might not be able to diagnose the problems, or fix them, but I
>> think they should still take responsibility until handed over
>> explicitly to someone else who knows the failing platform, right?
>>
>> It should be relatively straightforward to have some process send
>> email to authors of checkins that have created new failures.
> 
> I believe that was the original intent, but the buildbot set generated
> too many false alarms (due to flaky tests which would fail
> intermittently) so it was never implemented.
> 
> However, I believe the 3.x tests have had most of that flakiness
> eliminated (dropping bsddb helped greatly on that front), so it should
> be feasible to restore that feature for the stable buildbot set on the
> Py3k branch.

I think that would be good, and an attractive extra benefit of the work
that's gone into the tests recently. The point of having the buildbots
was to alert people to when one of their changes breaks a build they
weren't able to test on. Indeed I seem to remember at one time I used to
see "blame" emails, which were not always accurate (I haven't been
subscribed to checkins for a while due to volume of other mail). That's
a heavy load to carry for a new developer, so having defined people to
go to for help on strange platforms would be useful. Assuming, of
course, that such people can be identified.

I'm well aware that developers have limits on the time they can spend on
Python. There's no blame here, just a wish to improve the process and
ensure that the Windows platform doesn't become the "poor relation".

Thanks to everyone for the positive responses.

regards
 Steve
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