Sandboxes everywhere

Jon Udell's most recent InfoWorld column talks about "Easing app deployment with an open source sandbox". The article talks about a hosting service which offers an automated sandbox installer and thus considerably eases the deployment and testing of packages. This resonates with one of the main goals of the Cheesecake Summer of Code project: to offer a sandbox environment where Python packages can be uploaded and inspected dynamically, by running their unit tests, getting code coverage numbers, etc.

To me, 2006 seems to be the year of the virtual machine. Here's the equation:

commodity hardware + solid open-source virtualization technologies such as Xen = great opportunities for testers

Many companies have already started to capitalize on this equation (Autoriginate/HostedQA is just one example). The beauty of Open Source however makes this opportunity available to anybody who possesses a medium-to-high amount of Linux hacking skillz :-).

I'll post more about this topic as work on Cheesecake/SoC progresses. The way I see it, we'll offer a way for people to post their packages to one of our servers, and we'll compute all the dynamic Cheesecake scores (such as code coverage obtained by running unit tests) in a dedicated virtual machine. These dynamic scores will also be computed when a request comes from the PyPI interface. This is all on the drawing board right now, but that's the general idea.

Another related project that hasn't been started yet, based on an idea that Titus had last year, would be to automatically apply patches to Python core, compile, build and run all unit tests, all of this in a safe sandbox environment. This will hopefully lower the barrier of accepting patches into Python core.