On Thu, Mar 22, 2012 at 12:03 PM, Stefan Behnel <stefan...@behnel.de> wrote: > Dag Sverre Seljebotn, 22.03.2012 19:21: >> On 03/22/2012 10:52 AM, Stefan Behnel wrote: >>> Dag Sverre Seljebotn, 22.03.2012 17:58: >>>> On 03/22/2012 09:03 AM, Stefan Behnel wrote: >>>>> I would prefer copying the original installation over >>>>> (including the build history), rather than rebuilding it. >>>> >>>> I hope it doesn't come to this, but if it does, I think we should really >>>> look hard at ShiningPanda instead. >>> >>> We could set up an OSS test account to see what we'd get for our money, >>> i.e. how much of our build/test cycle we can put into one hour in their >>> environment. >>> >>>> Honestly, my feeling is that if we can't rally up $240/month in funding >>>> among Cython users then we might as well give up. >>> >>> As long as we have sage.math, I can think of better things to do with 240$ >>> per month. Didn't we want to organise another workshop at some point? >> >> I honestly don't think there's a lack of money for things like this once we >> go around asking; the most expensive part of any workshop is the time of >> the participants. >> >> Workshops in particular may be fundable through William's grant. The main >> problem is when people are available. Robert will not be available for some >> time, and neither will I (though I'm much less important these days), but >> if the rest would like to meet up I'm sure it is fundable one way or the >> other. > > Yep, sounds like a time rather than money issue. > > >>> Regarding funding in general, maybe we should just start putting up one or >>> two of those sexy funding bars on our web site, like the PyPy devs do for >>> their funded projects. Assuming that goes well, it would also allow us to >>> put money on dedicated projects by paying basically ourselves for doing >>> tasks that we won't normally spend our precious spare time on (e.g. because >>> they appear too large for a weekend), but that we and our users deem >>> necessary for some reason. >> >> Well, outright funding for projects is of a totally different order of >> magnitude. The $240 doesn't pay for more than between 1 and 4 hours of >> "grown-up" developer time (at least in Western Europe and US); for serious >> feature-funding you're starting to need thousands or tens-of-thousands of >> dollars rather than hundreds. > > PyPy manages to get those amounts. Just look at their home page, the > projects are all in the tens of thousands of dollars. I don't think that's > impossible for us.
Cool, that's promising. Do you think we would have the developer resources to follow through if we did something like this? >> Smaller constant-amount bounties (like GSoC) for fun stuff one would have >> motivation to do otherwise is a different matter. My impression is that a) >> core devs have no more time for Cython than they spend already, b) Cython >> development is a bit too difficult to enter for random "bounty-hunters". > > Regarding b), PyPy is far worse. Possibly. > Regarding a), I'm not so sure. At least I would consider it a way to focus > my work. Currently, I'm rather reluctant to starting anything that looks > like more than a couple of evenings or a weekend. Though the crazyiness in my personal life over the last 6+ months is winding down, I doubt I'd have enough spare time to be, e.g., the equivalent of 1/4-full time, or that funding would significantly change the situation. But that's not an argument against not letting you (and the rest of the project) benefit. >> Slightly related: I believe the best thing we can do to attract more >> developers is to seriously clean up the codebase. My new year's resolution >> is that if I get some days for working on Cython this year (I hope to), >> I'll spend it only on cleaning up the codebase, not on (even simple) >> features. > > Yay! +100 >>> Basically, any "real" CEP that we consider doable and that we'd have a >>> developer for could get a funding account where users could "vote" for it >>> by donating money. >>> >>> (and that's where the legal issues start ...) >> >> Well, I seem to remember from a talk that NumFOCUS will have a full-time >> (or part-time?) position to deal with such administration. And they'll be >> set up as a non-profit (so tax-exempt for US-based donations). So I think >> that's a better route than PayPal. > > Sounds like it. Is their tax-exempt status restricted to the US? That would > be unfortunate for many donators. Tax-exempt status is a criteria set by each individual government, not by the entity. I'm sure if it helped money flow in they would consider filing the necessary paperwork. >> Should we solicit donations on our webpage with a link to NumFOCUS? (I can >> ask NumFOCUS whether they're cool with that.) > > Interesting. If they have the administration set up (BTW, is that paid or > do they want something for that?), they should be able to handle project > specific money as well. > > >>> Speaking for myself, I don't consider the time wasted that I invested into >>> the Jenkins setup so far, and I'm also not sure there'd be all that much to >>> gain by no longer administrating the server installation itself by >>> ourselves. The bulk of the work is about configuring jobs and writing >>> build/test/whatever scripts, which still applies to a cloud installation >>> (with, I assume, the added disadvantage of no longer being able to ssh >>> directly into the machine). >> >> There is SSH access at least to the environment where the tests are run, >> according to their web pages. > > Ok, that's cool. > > >>>> ShiningPanda also offers features like testing on Windows. >>> >>> That *is* a feature, but it also takes up additional (paid) time. We >>> wouldn't have to run continuous tests on it, though, just trigger tests >>> manually when we want them. >> >> And it's in beta so far. But it's a feature sage.math will never get. > > Sure. However, most code we write isn't platform specific, and having a CI > server run Windows tests doesn't always help in debugging them if you don't > have a Windows box to reproduce the problem. Their SSH access may help on > that one (assuming that you get a usable environment there, including > MinGW/gdb or Microsoft's compiler environment), but I should note that > setting up the Jenkins jobs for Windows basically means rewriting them > completely (and remotely). What do you even get when you ssh into their > Windows box? Not a DOS prompt, I hope? Even if we couldn't debug remotely, just having a continuous build setup would be a huge boon for being able to locate the commits that cause trouble rather than trying to debug a release candidate much later. - Robert _______________________________________________ cython-devel mailing list cython-devel@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/cython-devel
