[Python-Dev] Windows

[Paul Moore]

On 4 August 2010 08:49, Tim Golden <mail at timgolden.me.uk> wrote:
> I have watched the buildbot pages occasionally, especially when I see
> Windows-related commits going in, but several times "red" buildbots
> have turned out to be -- apparently -- environmental / local issues
> unrelated to commits. Obviously I could/should have contacted the
> buildbot owner to at least inform him or her that something was amiss.
> But somehow at that point one's technical enthusiasm for fixing a
> problem diminishes when it's not clear that there *is* a problem.
> (Grumble, grumble, mutter, mutter... :) )

I agree that having a buildbot of your own to administer tends to
encourage you to be more aware of issues - it certainly did for me.
However, from my own experience, the Windows buildbot environment is
fairly flaky, and I spend far too much time killing "stuck" python
processes and VS JIT debugger processes, rather than actually usefully
debugging real issues. (And I don't know of any way of finding out
where the stuck processes came from or what they were doing at the
time that they got stuck, so all I can do is kill them...)

I don't have any Windows sysadmin experience, so I struggle to fix
these types of problem, and doing so often takes up all the time that
would otherwise go to areas where I *could* do some good, digging into
genuine issues :-(

I don't really have any answer to this problem right now. Is it
possible to set up a local buildslave-like environment (so I can run
the test suite on my development PC without needing to set up access
and register that PC as a temporary buildslave, which wouldn't be
practical for me)? If I can get an environment where I can run the
tests as I need and debug them in place, I might be able to work on
improving the reliability of things.

Paul.