I think we can (and will) do better. Setting up and maintaining such machines is quite an effort and cost (especially from security/isolation point of view, protecting against supply-chain attacks but also against people who try to use such environments for bitcoin mining and similar [1] - and there are many more aspects).
Just having a machine without having a fully managed lifecycle and someone to solve problems of people using it on a daily basis is not enough. However the plan is (for a long time) to make Airflow fully integrated with Codespaces [2] when they become generally available. It has been initially planned for Q3 2020 but due to complexity of making it publicly available (and solving the problems I mentioned above) this has been shifted to Q3 2021 (by a year). It isn't an easy thing to release. But I am quite confident GitHub will do it eventually and we will be fully on-board with it. [1] https://www.infoq.com/news/2021/04/GitHub-actions-cryptomining/ [2] https://github.com/features/codespaces [3] https://github.com/github/roadmap/issues/55 J. On Sun, Jun 13, 2021 at 11:12 AM David Brownkush <[email protected]> wrote: > > Hi All, > > There is a high obstacle of entry to start contributing to Airflow that might > deter new contributors from actually contributing, and that is the > complicated environment setup for running pre-commits and tests as described > in the quick start guide (not so quick actually). One would need an Ubuntu > machine lying around with pycharm installed and decent cpu & memory to run > airflow. > > What if there were a public server that aspiring contributors could SSH into, > skip all the trouble of setups, dive straight into the code and start > working on their first issues? Would anyone care to donate a free machine? > > Just a thought; thanks for reading. > David -- +48 660 796 129
