Re: status update

On Wed, Jan 29, 2003 at 01:36:35AM +0100, Laura Creighton wrote:
> <snip> 
> > My point was the snake-farm is doing its job.  It is a nice benefit.
> > But it would be even better if we could get it stable, so there's only
> > green.
> 
> Is this still a 'not enough people and not enough hours in the day'
> problem, or could something else happen to expedite matters?

I hope the rest of this message doesn't sound like I'm complaining,
but it probably will.  I'm thankful for the snake-farm, but it takes a
lot to get it up to speed and to keep it running smoothly.

The biggest help would be finding someone that can help with the AIX
problem described a bit more below.

There's a combination of issues.  Certainly more people and more time
would help.  Builds take a long time.  I suspect several issues
going on with this:  NFS; older machines, limited by memory and/or
CPU; other processes running, etc.  For reference, my 3 year old
PC builds everything from scratch in about 2 minutes.  It seems
most of the faster machines in the farm take twice that time.

There are also potentially many different configurations/changes
necessary.  For example, a debug build, build without optimization,
use a different compiler, turn a single define off, etc.
Each clean build multiplies the time it takes.

The Solaris hanging problem took a great deal of time to diagnose
and work on a patch.  The problem turned out to be an an apparent
bug in the Solaris 8 operating system.  This is no one's fault,
but it was time consuming.

A bunch of the current problems are due to the compilers not working.

I'm completely stuck on the AIX problem.  It seems no one else has
this problem.  I don't know how to debug it further.  Importing a
dynamic module (actually loading the .so works), but as soon as the
module (.so) calls back into the interpreter, python crashes.  The
function addresses look fine.

HP-UX isn't working now, due to some similar problems and fixes to
Solaris.  But HP-UX should be close to working again.

I believe we are making progress.  However, since python is always
changing, sometimes we take a step back for each step forward.

I'm really not complaining about this.  It takes a lot of work
to get everything under control.  I believe we are making progress.
It's just slower than I had hoped.

Neal