[Buildbot-devel] Acceptable dependency versions for patches?

[David Bolen]

I'd like to submit some patches for the buildbot code, and was
wondering what's a reasonable minimum version of Python and/or Twisted
to aim such patches at?

The online user manual states Python 2.2+ and Twisted 1.3+, but they
are fairly old.  (The manual also uses Twisted 2.1.0 as the latest as
of its writing, which makes me wonder if it is out of date).  A wiki
specific to Windows seems to require Python 2.4 and Twisted 2.4.0.
The readme in the source uses Python 2.3 and twisted 2.0.x (with current
esting indicated as 2.4.0 which is still reasonably old).

At the moment the areas I've got changes for:

* File uploading, which breaks down for large files due to chaining
  all the deferreds for every block of the file, which if the file is
  large enough will blow up by exceeding Python's recursion limit as
  the chain is processed (not to mention using more memory).  I've
  switched this to a generator based approach.  (I haven't patched
  downloading, but it has the same potential issue)

* Protecting against pop-up error boxes in child processes.  This is
  Windows-specific, so can I assume the Win32 extensions will be present,
  or should I conditionally check (I could optionally fall back to ctypes)?

* A scheduling fix (which I emailed about previously) to handle cases of
  clock jumps such as when running under VMWWare.

My local patches are sufficient for me, but to submit a patch back I
figured I'd should try not to impose new dependency requirements.

Thanks.

-- David