For those who missed my announcement last week on Twitter –

As a result of a mostly tongue-in-cheek conversation on IRC with Elizabeth Leddy, Alex Clark, and Matthew Wilkes, I decided to set up the global zc.buildout threat level indicator.

The indicator collects reports of success and failure from actual buildout runs, and displays the current threat level based on the percentage of buildouts that have succeeded in the past 4 hours.

I'm happy to report that the current threat level is LOW.

Creating the indicator was mostly an excuse to try writing a Google App Engine app, but it's already proved its utility.  Last Thursday the threat level reached ELEVATED after a new distribute release started causing buildouts to fail under Python 2.4. Thanks to Tarek Ziadé for the quick response with a new distribute release to fix that.

You can help make the indicator more accurate!  Just add the buildout.threatlevel extension to your buildout:

[buildout]
extensions = buildout.threatlevel

This will display the current threat level as one of the initial steps when you run buildout (so that you have an opportunity to abort if it has reached SEVERE), and will ping my app engine app when the buildout is done to report success or failure. (No data is collected in this ping aside from a boolean indicating success, time, and IP address.)

Code for the GAE app and buildout extension is in the collective.