[SciPy-dev] [Fwd: Build bots?]

[bryce hendrix]

Eric,

At Enthought we use CruiseControl (http://cruisecontrol.sf.net) for all 
of our internal builds as well as our open source projects, such as 
enthought, chaco, traits, kiva, etc. Just this week I added numpy and 
scipy to our builds. Right now I've only got it building in Windows, but 
I will have it building on Redhat 3.0 in a couple of days.

If you're not familiar with CruiseControl, its an build system allows 
for continuous and scheduled builds with support for several SCM 
systems. Its a build system with a lot of features, but at the same time 
its kind of ill suited for building python packages. The problem with 
using CruiseControl is that its targetted at continuous builds and 
detecting build breaks, which isn't all that useful for python projects. 
We've taken it a bit further and use CruiseControl to do continuous 
builds with unit & coverage testing, plus scheduled builds which build 
installers, generate html and other tasks. So while CruiseControl is ill 
suited for bulding python packages, it is well suited for automating 
everything else we want to do.

If anyone is interested in contributing to this effort, I welcome the 
help. Or if anyone would like to hear about all the nifty customizations 
we made, I can tell you about those too.

Bryce

>
> Does anyone know if there are or have been any build bots for scipy
> and similar pieces of software? Would there be any interest if I were
> to look into them?
>
> It seems that a lot of the questions on the various scipy-related
> lists are "I can't seem to build version foo on distro bar" or "the
> latest svn check-in broke foo".
>
> I have an extra machine at home and some experience with xen (a linux
> VMware-like virtual machine system), and so would be interested in
> helping set up such a system. I was envisioning testing the following
> configurations:
>
> projects: 
> numpy
> scipy
> pytables
> ipython
> matplotlib
>
> across:
>
> debian sarge
> debian testing
> fedora core 4
> redhat enterprise linux 4 WS 
> ubuntu (breezy badger) 
>
> My experience with other linux distros (and the *bsds) (and the
> sometimes-forgotten other architectures, like ppc), as well as
> windows, is rather limited, but I'll happily take suggestions for
> additional things to add.
>
> Ideally we'd produce a set of scripts that end users could eventually
> run on their own machines, if they wish, which would then upload the
> results to the main build test machine, or maybe http-post to a page
> on the scipy wiki.
>
> Every night, we'd checkout the latest svn from the projects, and try a
> build across the architectures; we'd output that info to a centralized
> location and then stick it on the web. 
>
> I'm sure I'm not the first person to think of this, and maybe not the
> first to try, so I'll take all the advice you want to throw at
> me. Eventually, it would be nice to have this set up to automatically
> run the unit tests as well, but right now that seems a bit
> ambitious. Maybe this summer... :) 
>
>
> 		...Eric
>
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