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

[bryce hendrix]

Eric Jonas wrote:
> Bryce, 
>
>   
>> 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.
>>     
>
>    That sounds wonderful! Is the result of the build attempts visible
> anywhere? Do you have plans to support more OSes/linux distributions?
>   
RH 4 for 64 bit is next for us, beyond that, maybe OS X. The effort 
doesn't currently has a public face, I've got a bit of work to do on 
authentication before I can open it up. This should happen very soon.
>   
>> 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.
>>     
>    I'm still not quite clear on how it's ill-suited to python -- is it
> because building things on python rarely "breaks"?
>   
I didn't want to get into it too much, but there are (were) a few problems:

* build scripts are Ant files. We run python ant scripts to run 
distutils, but when a build breaks the ant process doesn't return a 
useful error message. The complete error and stack are in the log files, 
but the admin has to go read the log file rather than relying on one of 
CruiseControl's publishers.

* Python's unit tester didn't support XML output. I had to extend the 
unittest code to write junit compliant XML output.

* Extending CruiseControl requires J2EE experience

* CruiseControl's build metrics only cover build breaks. Since Python's 
build rarely breaks, the metrics are almost useless..
>   
>> 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.
>>     
>
> I'd love to hear about it, and I'm guessing many others would as
> well. After spending some time reading the buildbot (buildbot.sf.net)
> documentation, one of the things it lets you do is have an array of
> "build slaves" that can be located anywhere and just have to have a
> user account running the build slave daemon. If you want to make sure
> things compile/run/test on your esoteric platform, you just have to
> run a build-slave. Does cruisecontrol have anything like this? 
>
> 			...Eric
>   
CruiseControl and Ant both have hacks that allow for distributed builds 
which maybe on varying platforms. I'm not sure we're going to go that 
way, instead we'll probably run CruiseControl on each platform and 
aggregate the build results on a single server.

Bryce
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/scipy-dev/attachments/20060316/4d4649ab/attachment.html>