Rackspace's very generous support of the Zope Foundation over many years is coming to an end this year. I am soliciting advice from the Zope developer community on how to manage that transition. We have made use of the platform in two ways: Continuous Integration ---------------------- We have been running periodic tests on the 'winbot' host, allowing us to mainain a very high level of Windows compatibilty for the Foundation's software. However, keeping the tests up and running has become increasingly difficult, due to the limited access to the machine and the small group of developers with both time and know-how to administer it. At this point, the tests have been failing routinely since at least April, and pretty much nobody has a clue how to fix them. Building Windows Binaries ------------------------- We have used winbot to automate building eggs and Windows installers for Foundation-created packages, and uploading them to PyPI. With the ascendancy of the newer wheel format, the both formats are becoming much less broadly useful: 'pip' ignores them, and the newest Python version (3.3) for which we build them sunsets at the end of September this year. Summary ------- - Without a continuing 100% subsidy, we *must* turn the box of by the end of the year. - The machine is in a fragile/b0rken state right now - Rather than dragging out the inevitable, I recommend we just decommission the machine ASAP. AFAIK, it contains no data we care about, except for encrypted PyPI credentials for the 'zope.wineggbuilder' account: we should remove them before shutting the machine down.. Discuss? Tres. -- =================================================================== Tres Seaver +1 540-429-0999 tseaver@palladion.com Palladion Software "Excellence by Design" http://palladion.com