Volunteer for a workshop on "setting up your own buildbot/buildslave"? (Was: Experiences with El Capitan)

[Mojca Miklavec]

Hi,

On Mon, Nov 9, 2015 at 10:29 PM, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
> On Nov 9, 2015, at 2:34 AM, Artur Szostak wrote:
>
>> Let me ask another question: Is there a seamless way to add building and mirroring services from 3rd parties for the pre-built binaries?
>
> No. We want verified binaries built in a clean-room by known servers, not binaries built in unknown conditions by arbitrary contributors.

But from what I understand one should be able to *manually* add a
buildbot's IP or URL to fetch the binaries? I totally agree that
MacPorts should not support adding arbitrary buildbots automatically,
but it should be possible to add your own, right?

Me and Aljaž were discussing the idea of:
- bringing a recent decent mac to the MacPorts meeting (in March 2016)
- bringing a PowerMac G5
- trying to set up a local mirror (for distfiles etc.) and a local
buildbot/buildslave on both
- preparing a short workshop/tutorial about setting up your own
buildbot/buildslave (with someone preparing slides with clear
instructions and giving enough time for a hands-on exercise)

The output/benefit of this workshop would be the following:
- having a 10.5 buildslave (ideally also including libc++ support) at
hand to get feedback about potential problems with software (and
hopefully having an unofficial 10.11 buildslave to play with)
- get more developers familiar with the process
- so that potentially some university/company could easily set up
their own buildbots according to their local needs, or maybe just to
build some additional software that is not part of the official
distribution
- so that a group of "hackers" with mutual trust could use their own buildbots
- so that a group of developers could decide to easily test some
nontrivial changes in private trees with portfiles (like a switch from
multiple versions of Perl to a single version; or a move of Qt from
one location to another)
- so that some eager user could monitor building problems of the
latest commits in case the official buildbots experience problems

My question is: is there any volunteer on this list (independent on
whether he or she will be able to physically attend the meeting) to
prepare the workshop [materials] and test the procedures?

Thank you,
    Mojca