buildbot questions

[Joshua Root]

On 2011-8-3 01:37 , Marko Käning wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> only a few days ago I learnt about MacPorts' buildbot. And I have a few questions.
> 
> 
> 1) When or is it scheduled at all that port maintainers get an email when their port(s) fail building? I just saw in the Waterfall graph for status-stdio something like
> 
> 	not emailing mk at macports.org (not set up yet)

Same as every other feature, when someone implements it.

> for ports which FAILED. I guess it would be valuable for a port maintainer to know about this. Only because of this hint I see now that soprano cannot be installed due to a not responding git server… (which might be temporary, or only valid for the buildbot for some reason, but who knows)
> 
> Could it be that the buildbot is blacklisted by a.k.o?
> 
> 	anongit.kde.org[0: 184.106.129.124]: errno=Connection refused

The buildslave is behind a restrictive firewall, so it can't fetch from
svn://, git:// or ftp:// URLs.

> 2) To find the output of a certain port's build procedure one would have to download compile-stdio (which get be fairly large). It would be cool to have the possibility to download the stdio output for the respective ports. But I guess this is all buildbot stuff and can't be so easily modified for MacPorts, right?

Buildbot is designed to be extended. It would be possible to upload all
the logs to the build master and make them available. You could also
just force a build for the port you're interested in by setting a build
property called 'portlist' with the port name as its value.

> 3) Do I understand correctly that the buildports slave always tries to build "all" (i.e. all ports present on MacPorts) and therefore mostly fails at a certain point. Once it failed the slave checks which ports have changed in SVN in the meantime and tries to build just those for verification. Once that's done it automatically starts a new "all" build, right?

No, it only builds automatically in response to commits.

> 4) I guess. because of point 3 above it could be worthwhile to have a 2nd buildports-buildbot which could faster process changed ports. In parallel the 1st buildports-buildbot would always keep trying to build "all". (But who knows, it looks like "all" regularly fails after 15 to 30 hrs, so that the small chunks of changed ports get their chance after this time span - which might be indeed enough?)

We only need to get through 'all' once.

> Anyway, It looks like this facility is essential to bring binary port packages to MacPorts. Really cool stuff!
> 
> Greets,
> buildbot-newbee Marko

- Josh