[Python-Dev] Snakebite, buildbot and low hanging fruit -- feedback wanted! (Was Re: SSH access against buildbot boxes)

[Nick Coghlan]

On Sun, Nov 7, 2010 at 9:24 PM, Trent Nelson <trent at snakebite.org> wrote:
> 1.  Set up standard build slaves on all the platforms, but put something in
> place that allowed committers to ssh/mstsc in to said slaves when things go
> wrong in order to aid with debugging and/or maintaining general buildbot
> health (OK'ing modal crash dialogues on Windows, for example).

This sounds like a great place to start. Perhaps focus on one or two
of the less common platforms first (e.g. FreeBSD 7 has been hitting a
few semaphore issues lately). The big 3 (Windows/Mac/Linux) are
usually reasonably well covered for debugging purposes by people that
use them for development.

> 2.  Address the second problem of the buildbot web interface sucking for
> non-standard branches.  I'm thinking along the lines of a hack to buildbot,
> such that upon creation of new per-activity branches off a mainline,
> something magically runs in the background and sets up a complete buildbot
> view at python.snakebite.org/dev/buildbot/<your-branch-name>, just as if you
> were looking at a trunk buildbot page.
>
> I'm not sure how easy the second point will be when we switch to hg; and
> I'll admit if there have been any python-dev discussions about buildbot once
> we're on hg, I've missed them.

With the switch to hg.python.org imminent, it may be better to focus
on Hg for that part (unless you have other projects in mind that also
use SVN). I believe Martin and/or Dirkjan have worked out the
equivalent triggers and build commands needed to switch the buildbot
fleet from svn to hg, but I'm not entirely certain about that one.

Good to know things are still progressing though - traffic on the
website news feed and the mailing list has been a little sparse this
year ;)

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia