Is it time to start regression testing yet?

[Bryan Blackburn]

On Mon, Jun 08, 2009 at 03:36:21PM -0500, Ryan Schmidt said:
[...]
> You said you wrote this with Rails and CouchDB. While I understand the 
> desire to write using technologies you're familiar with, MacPorts is 
> written in Tcl, and the main MacPorts web site is written in PHP and 
> MySQL, and it would be nice to not introduce new technologies if  
> possible, so as to lower the barrier to entry for other developers. It's 
> easy for me to say, since I am very familiar with PHP and MySQL, and do 
> not know and had not planned to know Rails and CouchDB. In fact I would 
> rather not have yet another hostname and yet another disjoint part of the 
> MacPorts web experience, but rather integrate this content into the 
> existing www.macports.org web site, or into the new port pages planned 
> with #19300:
>
> http://trac.macports.org/ticket/19300

Of course it doesn't really lower the barrier if someone knows Rails but not
PHP, especially when quite a bit of code has already been written.  While
trying to stay homogeneous would be nice language-wise, it has been an issue
with getting base developers as many people don't know/don't want to learn
Tcl.  Fortunately both PHP and Rails are popular so I'm guessing we'll have
less of an issue with developers for those areas than for Tcl.  Unless
you're willing to rewrite in PHP?

>
>
> I notice it flagged the mldonkey build as failed, but in fact it was one 
> of mldonkey's dependencies which failed. Perhaps there is a way that could 
> be made more clear in the interface.

mpab should be skipping ports where a dependency failed, and not even trying
otherwise; though this only happens when you tell it to build everything
instead of specifying a list of ports.

[...]
>
> Have you coordinated with him? We don't want duplication of effort. Your 
> work is clearly logging something because the logs are appearing on your 
> web site. If this is not integrated with the MacPorts Tcl code, perhaps 
> you can assist Dmitry in doing so. If you and Dmitry finish the logging 
> task early I'm sure there are other tasks we can have him do for the rest 
> of the summer.

Fortunately the logging stuff should be implemented in a way that will be
useful for various scenarios, including integration with MPWA (if that ever
happens) as well as things like mpab.  Note that the way mpab works now is
it just uses debug and keeps the output around, basically a really cheap
form of what the logging stuff will do.  I'm guessing the way Florian is
accessing these with the web stuff is to just copy it out from the chroot.

Bryan