[Python-Dev] Community buildbots and Python release quality metrics

[glyph at divmod.com]

On 01:02 am, grig.gheorghiu at gmail.com wrote:
>To bring my $0.02 to this discussion: the Pybots 'community buildbots'
>turned out largely to be a failure.

Let's not say it's a failure.  Let's instead say that it hasn't yet 
become a success :-).
>I still haven't given up, and I hope this thread will spur project
>leaders into donating time, or resources, to the Pybots project. It
>has been my bitter observation about the Open Source world that people
>just LOVE to get stuff for free. As soon as you mention more
>involvement from them in the form of time, money, hardware resources,
>etc., the same brave proponents of cool things to be done are nowhere
>to be found.

I think this list is the wrong place to go to reach the people who need 
to be reached.  It's python core developers and other people already 
involved in and aware of core development.  That said I'm not sure what 
the *right* place is; I think your blog is syndicated on the unofficial 
planet python, so maybe that's a good place to start.  Sadly, the right 
thing to do in terms of drumming up support is to get someone interested 
in PR and have them go to each project individually, but that might be 
more effort than setting up the buildbots themselves, at least 
initially...

However, let's say that this were tremendously successful, and lots of 
people start paying attention.  I think pybots.org needs to be updated 
to say exactly what a participant interested in python testing needs to 
do, beyond "here's how you set up a buildbot" (a page that is actually a 
daunting-looking blog post which admits it may be somewhat outdated), 
because setting up a buildbot might not be the only thing that the 
project needs.  It's one thing to tell people that they need to be 
helping out (and I'm sure you're right) but it's much more useful to get 
the message out that "we really need people to do X, Y, and Z".  One 
thing I will definitely commit to is that if you make a "cry for help" 
page, I'll blog about it to drive attention to it, and I'll encourage 
the other, perhaps better-read Python bloggers I know to do so as well.

My personal interest at the moment is to get all of the irrelevant red 
off of the community builders page.  Whether or not you believe in an XP 
"green bar" philosophy, the large number of spurious failures is 
distracting.  Who is it that is capable of making appropriate changes? 
Is there something I could do to help with that?  Note that I'm 
committing to say that I can do *that*, but, at least you could shut me 
up by making it my fault ;-).

(I'd also like to improve the labels of the build slaves.  What exactly 
is "x86 Red Hat 9 trunk" testing?  Trunk of what?  What project?)

It would be good to remove the perception that it's somebody else's 
problem as much as possible.  Right now, all these dead buildbots 
suggest to the various communities, "oh, I guess that guy who runs that 
buildbot needs to fix it".  The dead bots should just be killed off, and 
their projects removed from the list, so that if someone wants to get 
involved and set up a bot for lxml, they're not put off of it by the 
fact that it might be rude to the guy who is currently (allegedly) 
running it.