[Biopython-dev] BuildBot shutdown

[Peter Cock]

Dear Biopythoneers,

Around the end of 2010, with Tiago taking the lead from
Biopython, we setup an OBF owned Amazon hosted buildbot
server for nightly automated testing - initially for Biopython
but also BioPerl and BioRuby were tried.

https://buildbot.net/

I'd like to thank Tiago for his work setting this up, and also
Hilmar Lapp and Chris Dagdigian, on the AWS side.

My employer, the James Hutton Institute, has also helped
by allowing some of the machines here to run as buildbots
to run nightly tests. Tiago also administered several build
machines.

Since then, Biopython has come to use TravisCI more and
more for Linux continuous integration testing, and lately
AppVeyor for Windows testing. TravisCI can also in principle
run Mac OS X tests, but Python is not yet officially supported.

Both companies currently provide this service free of
charge for open source projects as a loss leader for
commercial business. I certainly can see the value of
paying for this as a service.

At this point we (Tiago and I) see little additional benefit in
the OBF continuing to pay AWS to host the buildbot server,
and us looking after individual buildbot nodes (which was a
burden).

We have therefore now shut down the buildbot server which
used to be run at http://testing.open-bio.org/

Thank you all,

Peter