Hopefully a service like this already exists and I just haven't found it yet. If not it could be an idea for some kind soul(s) to pick up and run with ;-)
As someone who writes and releases Python modules for the community, I find it difficult to have a decent level of confidence in the efficacy of my code on platforms and Python versions other than those that I own or use regularly. My documentation states that I support Python 2.3 or higher. This ends up being more of a statement of good intentions than a one of fact. A case in point. A bug (in Python), that I believed to have been killed off after Python 2.2, resurfaced in a 2.4.x release of Python on PowerPC recently. As I don't own any PowerPC kit, it was very difficult to a) investigate the bug and b) create an effective fix for it in a timely fashion. Fortunately I'd come across it before so the fix was easy but it might not have been. While I realise one's code can never be perfect, you can cover for these sorts of eventualities fairly easily by running your software and unit tests under different environments. You'd also like to be able to do this on a continual basis rather than just once or twice. If this was done with some kind of automated testing and reporting so much the better. Bigger projects that take code quality seriously probably already have this sort of thing in place for their own purposes, but for smaller ones it just isn't possible. Wouldn't it be great to have a service/setup out there available for Python developers to access that covered a fairly broad base of possible Python installations for the purpose of improve overall code quality? Am I the only one that would find something like this useful? Dave M. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
