jessenoller.com

Last night Trent Nel­son dropped a friendly note to the python-committers mail­ing list, you can see the full text here.

He and oth­ers (includ­ing dona­tions from var­i­ous com­pa­nies) have put together a net­work of machines with var­i­ous oper­at­ing sys­tems aimed at giv­ing var­i­ous projects wider (and com­plete, hooray logins!) access to plat­forms we nor­mally don’t have access to in addi­tion to the ones we have, but don’t have login access to.

To quote Trent:

And that’s when it hit me. Build­bots are fine when every­thing is
run­ning smoothly, but noth­ing com­pares to actu­ally hav­ing access to
a sys­tem when you’re try­ing to debug something.

So, I thought to myself, why not buy a cou­ple of clunky old boxes
off eBay and donate them to the PSF, such that all devel­op­ers had
access to them? I dropped a note to Guido and Neal, they put me
in touch with Titus, who had just accepted a posi­tion at Michi­gan
State, and, well…

Ten months, seven trips to MSU, six blown fuses and about $60,000
later, I’m proud to intro­duce you all to Snakebite: The Open Net­work!
A net­work of around 37-ish servers of all dif­fer­ent shapes and sizes,
spread over three sites, specif­i­cally geared towards the needs of
open source projects like Python.

Every CPython, Jython, Iron­Python and PyPy com­mit­ter will have access
to every devel­op­ment server on the net­work. I’ve also extended the
offer to promi­nent Python projects like Django and Twisted.

Even­tu­ally, I’ll invite other open source projects to par­tic­i­pate
(Apache, Sub­ver­sion, MySQL, Post­gres, etc), but the net­work is my
gift to All Things Python, first and fore­most, so Python projects
will always get pref­er­en­tial treatment.

Trent and other have man­aged to begin work on scratch­ing an itch I know a lot of us have felt. Just for mul­ti­pro­cess­ing alone, I have to main­tain a small farm of VMware images (today I’m adding fbsd and open­so­laris) to do bug fixes and devel­op­ment on.

Hav­ing a much larger, ded­i­cated build­bot farm with login priv­i­leges is going to be awe­some. Given that they’re expand­ing this to other projects as well is just icing on a deli­cious, deli­cious cake (mmm, cake).

I had con­sid­ered doing some­thing like this myself; but given I don’t have access to cheap host­ing, or hard­ware — that’s sort of makes it impos­si­ble. I had sketched up a plan to get an Apple 1U machine and throw virtualbox/vmware on it and host as many OSes and accounts as pos­si­ble (OS/X is cur­rently the only OS with­out rep­re­sen­ta­tion in the machines cur­rently listed).

Really, this is fan­tas­tic and the work and time that’s gone into putting this together as well as the dona­tions com­pa­nies like HP, Microsoft and oth­ers have made is sim­ple great.

As Trent notes in his email — they’re run out of phys­i­cal room to host stuff right now, but I have to imag­ine that as word spreads more com­pa­nies and peo­ple will gladly donate time and resource to what is really an excel­lent project. VPS hosts could prob­a­bly also get in the game in time as well.

This is just awesome.

You can see the site they’ve put together at http://www.snakebite.org/ and http://www.snakebite.org/network

Addi­tion­ally, Steve and Titus have posts too.

Last night Trent Nelson dropped a friendly note to the python-committers mailing list, you can see the full text here. He and others (including donations from various companies) have put together a network of machines with various operating systems aimed at giving various projects wider (and complete, hooray logins!) access to platforms we normally ...