MacPorts AutoBuild

[Jordan K. Hubbard]

On Jun 20, 2008, at 11:11 AM, William Siegrist wrote:

> Once MacPorts has the software ready for a build system, I can start  
> requesting hardware to support it. I have not looked at MPAB yet to  
> see how close it is to an automatic build system. I also remember  
> James saying MPWA would be used as the front-end for such a system,  
> and I dont think MPWA is ready either.
>
> So, if someone wants to lead the initiative to assemble the parts  
> and explain how I can deploy it on hardware, I'd be happy to ask for  
> more servers here.  If no one wants to take charge of this, I will  
> eventually work on it, but dont know when I'll have time.

We have a considerable collection of hardware lying around which could  
be repurposed to such a role rather easily.   There's a machine you  
use every day for backups, for example, which was, in fact, originally  
conceived and allocated to this exact purpose (you must have wondered  
at that attached RAID).  Of course that simply never happened, at  
least not beyond my own primitive attempts, all of which yielded such  
terrible results [>50% failure rates] that I came to have dark  
suspicions about my methodology for creating the build chroot (as well  
as dark suspicions about how many of our ports actually build at any  
given time) and went on to other things.

Anyway, if MPAB/MPWA are starting to generate good results on whatever  
development hardware is being used, and by "good results" I mean all  
of the below:

o	Building, or at least iterating through, all the ports in the system  
and generating helpful status information for each (even if it's  
"falls over immediately", that's good to know)

o	Taking at least some pains to isolate the build products from the  
builder host machine, both in files read and files written.

o	Has had all reasonable precautions taken after doing a reasonably  
pragmatic analysis of the security implications of executing all that  
open-ended Tcl code and how a "rogue port" might attack the builder,  
either deliberately or through carelessness.

Then I'd say it's time for us to start thinking seriously about  
putting this into early production.   This is the same checklist the  
project is going to have to go down before anyone will be willing to  
even "BETA" this on more private hardware anyway, so I don't think  
it's an unreasonable one.

- Jordan