I just submitted a Mellon Award for Tech Collaboration nomination for the Python Buildhaus. What's that, you ask?

The Python Buildhaus is a project to systematically build, test and release Open Source Python packages on Windows, Mac OS X, and a wide array of other UNIX architectures and operating systems (see snakebite.org for list). In addition to providing machine access, software support, and process support, we hope to create a set of best practices and process documentation to help the community address cross-platform compatibility issues. We will also build tools to extend the impact of this effort beyond Michigan State by providing longer-lasting developer resources, e.g. tools to auto-build Python eggs and installers across multiple platforms.

This will be an open resource for the Python community.

See the Python Buildhaus and our proposal.

This is basically an attempt to use Snakebite to push specifically to help with the cross-platform distribution problem.

--titus

Legacy Comments

Posted by Tarek Ziade on 2009-05-16 at 13:20.

What about having python's Distutils as your first use case ? ;)
-> every time a package is uploaded in PyPI, your infrastructure
downloads it, then tries to run various distutils commands, and
eventually install it under various platforms.    Of course, this
probably means you have to do every test in a fresh OS, then re-
initialize it for security reasons.

Posted by Titus Brown on 2009-05-16 at 13:23.

Exactly right.    Getting the infrastructure etc. to do that properly
is tough, however, especially when you're trying to have students
learn from the work ;)    Not sure how to deal with the security
concerns.  It should be possible on i386 archs with VMs, but I don't
know what to do about other archs.

Posted by Tarek Ziade on 2009-05-17 at 09:47.

Yes it's a complex topic.    If the buildbot is run into a VM, I don't
think it's possible for some code to bypass it or brake the host. I
think that the only thing a code can do is knowing it's running inside
a VM.    Then, if the VM is isolated from the network, (which should
not harm the tests) the security of the server should not be broken.
Now if the code has network features I don't know :)..    For the
arch, I use VMWare here to simulate 64bits on 32bits servers and vice-
versa, but I don't know about other virtual systems.    For the re-
initialize part, VMWare has snapshots, but maybe a more elegant and
fast way to re-initialize the VMs would be to use a ZFS. Never tried
it though.    Anyways,  very interesting project