[Python-Dev] Community buildbots (was Re: User's complaints)

[A.M. Kuchling]

On Fri, Jul 14, 2006 at 12:00:07PM +0200, Giovanni Bajo wrote:
> unstable or whatnot. There is no official statement of the kind "all
> the real development is done in branches, the trunk is always very
> stable, feel free to grab it". Thus, we (external developers) assume
> that it's better to wait for the first alpha or beta before starting
> doing any testing. 

Where could we put such a statement?
http://www.python.org/dev/tools/, in a discussion of checkin policies,
does say:  

	The Python source tree is managed for stability, meaning that
	if you make a checkout at a random point in time the tree will almost
	always compile and be quite stable. Large sets of changes, such as the
	2.2 type/class rewrite, are usually tested on a branch first and
	merged into the main stream of development once they're believed to be
	complete.

but this is buried pretty deeply.  Maybe some text should be added to
the release announcements about this.

> I'm lucky, by the time RC1 is out, most of them might have binary packages
> available for download, or at least have their (unstable) CVS/SVN trunk fixed
> for Python 2.5 (which means that I'll have to fetch that unstable version and

And many people won't make binary packages until 2.5 is final, so
you're probably not often lucky.

--amk