April 9, 2007

Buildbot Machines Wanted

I know there are quite a few hosting companies now who represent themselves as Python-friendly. Rather than trawl through the Wiki pages, however, and email each one separately I am sending this request to the comp.lang.python list (and putting it on my blog) in the hope of attracting those companies who are more involved with the Python community.

There is a particular problem, highlighted recently by this comment from Dennis Lee Beiber:
Too many 3rd-party modules still aren't available in 2.5 versions for my tastes...
This applies particularly (though not exclusively) to the Windows platform, for various reasons -- the most common one is that Linux developers frequently don't have a Windows machine available to help them test their builds and ensure that distributions are available.

I am trying to address this problem, initially by making hosted Windows machines available for use as buildbots. I already have agreement from Grig Gheorghiu (who maintains the PSF's buildbots) to try and support these efforts, and from Microsoft to consider providing appropriate software.

What I don't have is hosting companies offering me space on machines in their racks. If anyone reading this can help out I'd appreciate it if they would get in touch with me (replying to the newsgroup post or commenting on the blog entry should do it). These machines would need remote desktop access so they could be managed without physical presence.

The intention is to try and shorten the "version lag" so that new versions of Python can be better supported more quickly. I don't guarantee that this will happen overnight, but I'd like to make a start.

1 comment:

Titus Brown said...

Steve,

get in touch with me (titus@caltech.edu); I can give you a VMware virtual machine running Windows if you like.

Down the road, I hope to collaborate with Grig to get a cheeseshop-based 3rd party module compilation & testing system going. We have a SoC project that Grig is mentoring that will be a step in this direction...

--titus