[Twisted-Python] Buildbot slaves for Windows

[Glyph Lefkowitz]

> On Feb 2, 2015, at 4:16 AM, Adi Roiban <adi at roiban.ro> wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> Is this wiki page still valid?
> 
> http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/wiki/Windows
> 
> I saw that it was not updated in the last 5 years.

Yes, it's totally out of date.  We should probably just delete the page.

> I think that latest Visual Studio license is free to use for open
> source projects.

This is true.  Unfortunately this is not adequate for a Twisted build environment.

Python 2.7 was built against Visual Studio 2008, which means you need a copy of VS2K8 to build extensions.

Microsoft has released <http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=44266 <http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=44266>> to make this easier for people who are not professional developers.  Unfortunately this download is not quite adequate, because it does not include all the headers that are necessary for, for example, building pywin32.  My pypiwin32 build <https://warehouse.python.org/project/pypiwin32/ <https://warehouse.python.org/project/pypiwin32/>> will hopefully alleviate this problem, but to have a from-scratch environment as one would want for a buildbot (especially since we may need to be responsible for automated builds of pypiwin32 itself) we still need full developer tools and not just the restricted free stuff.

> My project/company can donate virtual machines. We will host them and
> our sysadmin will take care of their uptime.

Would you be able to provide external administrative access so that members of the project can access and maintain it as necessary?  We have had a recurring problem with donated hosting resources, even those with overall very good uptime, being inaccessible at critical times, such as sprints.

> We have a Proliant G5 2xQuad Core Xeon server which is idle at our UK
> office. It has UPS and dedicated RAID batteries.

Is that machine running a hypervisor or host OS we could have access to?  More donated hardware frees up our existing donated hardware and cloud resources to run other things :).

> We have donated 2 Linux VMs in the past but they were never used, so
> we have stop them.

Really, the most serious problem we have is a lack of administrative / operational resources, less so than hardware.  Don't get me wrong, hardware is useful!  But a couple of hours of a sysadmin's time every month would be even more so, because that would let us actually use all the servers that folks have offered :).

> We can provide license for Windows 8.1 and Windows 2012 Server as part of a
> Microsoft Partner Network licensing scheme.
> We don't have XP, Vista, Win7 licenses.

Thanks, I appreciate it.  However, Microsoft has granted the Twisted project an MSDN account in the past, so we were able to acquire the necessary licenses; if we needed more licenses I'm pretty sure we could get them.  (Also, we tend to care about the versions of Windows that people actually have installed on client machines, since the most important goal of Twisted running on Windows is to make sure it runs on clients "in the wild"; running on servers is a fine side-effect, but XP and Win7 are the most interesting versions from that perspective.)

-glyph

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