Thanks
to our long-suffering contributors Adi Roiban and Kyle
Altendorf, we now have macOS builds running on circleCI!
Supposedly we have sufficient resources to actually run all
our builds, too, without running out of CI juice before the
end of each month :-).
As such, I've changed our repository configuration to
drop the old, somewhat outdated macOS buildbot, and
replace it with the Circle CI infrastructure which should
cover that platform.
With this change, none of the buildbot builders define
our gating-to-trunk continuous integration. This is a
great thing for the project, as it means external
contributors will be able to get a "this is acceptable to
merge" green checkmark without ./admin/pr_as_branch or any
other similar repo:write-person-requiring shenanigans.
However, it also means that we are now spending a
not-insignificant amount of contributor time maintaining a
farm of machines that do tons of continuous integration
work, which may not really be telling us anything
interesting about Twisted's quality or correctness. I
think it might be worth considering decommissioning
buildbot.twistedmatrix.com entirely,
unless some of the vendors of the platforms and kernels
covered there would like to step up to do some maintenance
themselves. It's been a decade or so since Twisted was
spotting regular regressions in Linux, FreeBSD or Darwin,
so I think this style of build infrastructure may be a
relic of a bygone era.
For my part, I probably will start doing any
contributions on my own fork, since that will mean I don't
have to constantly kick random spurious RHEL7 buildbot
failures to avoid getting a red "X" on my PRs.
Furthermore, if we decom'd buildbot as software
infrastructure, we'd still have a significant amount of
cloud / hardware resources we could potentially throw at
*other* problems facing the project which cloud CI doesn't
cover as well, like SpeedCenter.
So, do folks have any strong feelings, or would anyone
like to volunteer to help with some aspect of this? As
always: we don't have enough folks to keep up with the
operational demands of
twistedmatrix.com,
so if you want to dev some ops or ops some infra, please
speak up :).
