[Buildbot-devel] Acceptable dependency versions for patches?

[Dustin J. Mitchell]

On 9/14/07, David Bolen <db3l.net at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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?

In general, 2.3 is still in wide use on various Linuxes, so requiring
anything beyond that is asking for trouble. Windows is, of course, a
special case :)

> * 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)

Generators should be safe.  You could alternately "break" the call
chain periodically by scheduling a timer with duration 0.

> * 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)?

I don't know much here, but I would say that the more compatibilty you
can add, without detracting from the clarity of what you're doing, the
better.

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

I'm excited about this change -- it doesn't sound like it has any
compatiblity implications, though, right?

Dustin

-- 
Storage Software Engineer
http://www.zmanda.com