[Buildbot-devel] SQLAlchemy version check fragile? Running buildbot master test suite on Ubuntu 14.04 beta 2

[Dan Kegel]

I was considering taking a stab at http://trac.buildbot.net/ticket/2425
so I fired up a development environment on my ubuntu 14.04 beta 2
workstation and ran the test suite with the commands

  sudo apt-get build-dep buildbot
  git clone ...
  cd buildbot/master
  trial buildbot.test

This said
 FAILED (skips=30, errors=197, successes=2758)
and produced lots of errors of the sort
exceptions.RuntimeError: SQLAlchemy version 0.8.4 is not supported by
SQLAlchemy-Migrate

I tried working around this with the commands

  sudo apt-get build-dep python-migrate
  sudo apt-get install python-dev
  sudo pip install --upgrade sqlalchemy-migrate

but then the test just failed with

exceptions.RuntimeError: SQLAlchemy version 0.9.4 is not supported by
SQLAlchemy-Migrate

I then looked at the screen a little more closely and saw the error
was being thrown by
master/buildbot/db/enginestrategy.py in the lines
    def check_sqlalchemy_version(self):
        ...
        if version_tup > (0, 7, 10):
            raise RuntimeError("SQLAlchemy version %s is not supported by "
                               "SQLAlchemy-Migrate" % (version,))

That warning might be out of date... seems a bit fragile, anyway.
Commenting it out seemed to let more tests run, and got me passing:
 PASSED (skips=39, successes=2946)

This is probably old hat for actual buildbot developers, I'm just posting it in
case other newbies have trouble setting up a working dev environment.