[Python-Dev] Tracker test instances (was: My thinking about the development process)

[R. David Murray]

On Sat, 06 Dec 2014 15:21:46 +0000, Brett Cannon <brett at python.org> wrote:
> On Sat Dec 06 2014 at 10:07:50 AM Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:
> > On Dec 6, 2014, at 9:11 AM, Brett Cannon <brett at python.org> wrote:
> >
> >> On Fri Dec 05 2014 at 8:31:27 PM R. David Murray <rdmurray at bitdance.com>
> >> wrote:
> >>> That's probably the biggest issue with *anyone* contributing to tracker
> >>> maintenance, and if we could solve that, I think we could get more
> >>> people interested in helping maintain it.  We need the equivalent of
> >>> dev-in-a-box for setting up for testing proposed changes to
> >>> bugs.python.org, but including some standard way to get it deployed so
> >>> others can look at a live system running the change in order to review
> >>> the patch.
> >>
> >> Maybe it's just me and all the Docker/Rocket hoopla that's occurred over
> >> the past week, but this just screams "container" to me which would make
> >> getting a test instance set up dead simple.
> >
> > Heh, one of my thoughts on deploying the bug tracker into production was
> > via a container, especially since we have multiple instances of it. I got
> > side tracked on getting the rest of the infrastructure readier for a web
> > application and some improvements there as well as getting a big postgresql
> > database cluster set up (2x 15GB RAM servers running in Primary/Replica
> > mode). The downside of course to this is that afaik Docker is a lot harder
> > to use on Windows and to some degree OS X than linux. However if the
> > tracker could be deployed as a docker image that would make the
> > infrastructure side a ton easier. I also have control over the python/
> > organization on Docker Hub too for whatever uses we have for it.
> >
> 
> I think it's something worth thinking about, but like you I don't know if
> the containers work on OS X or Windows (I don't work with containers
> personally).

(Had to fix the quoting there, somebody's email program got it wrong.)

For the tracker, being unable to run a test instance on Windows would
likely not be a severe limitation.  Given how few Windows people we get
making contributions to CPython, I'd really rather encourage them to
work there, rather than on the tracker.  OS/X is a bit more problematic,
but it sounds like it is also a bit more doable.

On the other hand, what's the overhead on setting up to use Docker?  If
that task is non-trivial, we're back to having a higher barrier to
entry than running a dev-in-a-box script...

Note also in thinking about setting up a test tracker instance we have
an additional concern: it requires postgres, and needs either a copy of
the full data set (which includes account data/passwords which would
need to be creatively sanitized) or a fairly large test data set.  I'd
prefer a sanitized copy of the real data.

--David