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

[Grig Gheorghiu]

On Sun, Jul 6, 2008 at 8:46 AM,  <glyph at divmod.com> wrote:
>
> 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 daunting-looking blog post which admits it may be somewhat outdated),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.

I have posted 'cries for help' repeatedly on my blog, with generally
little success. See http://agiletesting.blogspot.com/search?q=pybots .
But I will post again. If you can include here a paragraph of what
your vision of the 'X, Y and Z' above is, that'd help too. I think
I've been pretty clear about the benefits that the Pybots farm can
bring to a given project, so all project leaders on this list should
be aware of them IMO. If not, I'd be happy to rehash them. But the
home page of pybots.org is pretty self-explanatory I think.

>
> 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'll send a message to the pybots mailing list asking people whose
buildbots are turned off if they're still interested in running them.
Negative or no answers will mean we can remove them from the farm.

> (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's not only a question of changing a static label in this case. A
given buildslave can run the tests for multiple projects, in which
case it becomes tricky to change the label on the fly accordingly. As
an aside, the slave you mention was running on my machine, and I used
it to run the Twisted tests, but I shut it down a while ago because
the buildbot process was taking too many resources. If the Twisted
project can donate a machine, I'd be happy to include it in the Pybots
farm ASAP.

> 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.

As I said, I'll see what the current owners have to say, and then I'll
report back to this list.

Thanks for offering your help!

Grig