GSoC 2013: Binaries Idea

[Marcelo Galvão Póvoa]

On Mon, Apr 15, 2013 at 9:33 AM, Joshua Root <jmr at macports.org> wrote:
> On 2013-4-15 10:44 , Marcelo Galvão Póvoa wrote:
>>> There are multiple reasons why a port might not be available as binary:
>>>  - First, binary downloads are only used when some configuration
>>>    variables are still at their default, e.g. prefix=/opt/local,
>>>    applications_dir=/Applications/MacPorts.
>>>  - Second, we only build the default variants of every port. Building
>>>    every possible combination of variants would probably be
>>>    computationally expensive. We're trying to gather statistical data to
>>>    build popular variants, but that work hasn't been deployed yet.
>
>> I think approaching the second point would be interesting in this
>> project. Is there a tool to gather these statistics available
>> somewhere?
>
> I'm doubtful that this alone would be sufficient for GSoC. A simple
> config file checked into svn and some small changes to the MPAB script
> would be all it takes to build multiple variant sets per port.
>
> Gathering the stats was a previous GSoC project.
>

I didn't mean to suggest doing only that. Actually, it seems that
there are several different improvements that can be made to binaries
in Macports. So, my proposal would include a list of them, which so
far are the following (in no particular order):
- Display disk usage information for binary ports
- Implement file querying functionality for non-installed ports
- Make improvements to the MPAB system including better sandboxing (what else?)
- Deploy the statistics gathering code to be used in determining most
common variants to be automatically built by the buildbot.

Let me know what you think about this set of tasks, is it reasonable for a GSoC?

Marcelo