Python, Code, Pylons

Python 2.6 came out yesterday, so I figured I might as well see if Pylons works on it. Pylons already has a set of buildbots that builds Pylons along with some of its dependencies, so it was fairly trivial to add another builder to verify things ran swimmingly on Python 2.6.

Unfortunately, as one can see looking at the build results, things weren't so great. It appears that nose had a Python 2.6 incompatibility which is used to run all the various Pylons tests, meaning that they all failed so far mainly because the testing tool was Python 2.6 incompatible.

Making Buildbot nicer

While I wait for the new nose to be released, I did at least discover a little bug in my new webapp that provides a nicer view of the buildbot result set. I've been fairly displeased with the lack of conciseness of buildbot's waterfall display for awhile, and noticed that if only buildbot had a few more xmlrpc methods then it'd be trivial to build my own more kind interface.

I should note that the waterfall display isn't totally horrible, the Django folks spiced their builders up with some CSS work…. which reminds me, it isn't looking very good for those running on trunk at the moment. ;)

So after making my own little buildbot fork to add some additional custom xmlrpc methods to, I've come up with my own buildbot status viewer. I'm sure a more talented designer could spice it up even more, but it gives me the pertinent data I'm interested in without all the boring “builder connected, builder took a vacation” messages that cloud up the waterfall. Also, rather than displaying the cryptic “shell_21 failed” messages, it actually uses the names I attached, and shows them quite clearly for the last build.

I'll submit some patches for these xmlrpc additions to buildbot when I get the time, but right now I mainly needed the Mercurial 1.0 hook compatibility (that was broken for quite awhile in buildbot), and a fairly specific set of information from the xmlrpc methods that I wasn't sure others would want.

I'm looking forward to trying out the new nose so that I can hopefully verify Pylons is good to go on Python 2.6 as Phil Jenvey's been working tirelessly on patches to Beaker and other dependencies to make them 2.6 compatible. Any suggestions or thoughts on improving my buildbot viewer are welcome. :)