I'm a newbie mantainer and I'm confused about the buildbot

[Lawrence Velázquez]

> On Sep 29, 2016, at 3:26 PM, Leonardo Brondani Schenkel
> <leonardo.schenkel at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I recently started maintaining some MacPorts packages. For the first
> time today I got a message from the buildbot: apparently the neomutt
> package does not build on OS X 10.5 PPC due to '_safe_malloc' being
> undefined
> (https://build.macports.org/builders/ports-10.5_ppc_legacy-watcher/builds/632).
> My first question is regarding the procedure for failed builds: what
> is it expected that I as the maintainer should do in this case? Should
> I notify upstream and so maybe we could come up with a patch?
> Something else?

Our blanket policy is to support the three most recent major OS
versions. As of right now, that means Yosemite, El Capitan, and Sierra.
If you receive a failure notification from one of the relevant
buildslaves, you are expected to do something about it. Ideally you
would report the problem to upstream, who would then develop a general
fix that benefits all users. If the problem is not with the software
itself but with our packaging, hopefully upstream would be kind enough
to help you fix that. If upstream is uninterested for some reason,
you'll have to fix everything yourself and consider whether it's worth
maintaining a port with such an uncooperative upstream.

If the problem occurs on an earlier OS (as yours did), then it's up to
you. We'd like to keep ports working on as many systems as possible, but
you are not obligated to expend effort doing so. You should still report
the issue upstream, but upstream developers often don't want to support
legacy systems either. Sometimes you just have to choose between fixing
it yourself, opening a Trac ticket and hoping another intrepid dev takes
a crack at it, or leaving the port broken.

> After that mail I got dozens of mails today from the buildbot
> regarding other unrelated packages, many just a few seconds or minutes
> apart. Is this expected or was there a glitch? I don't get why I'm
> getting mails for packages that I didn't change or maintain.

This is a known bug in our configuration that we are attempting to
address: https://trac.macports.org/ticket/52446

> Maybe what I am asking is explained somewhere in the documentation,
> but honestly I couldn't find it. I may be looking at the wrong place.

We don't really have much documentation on the Buildbot infrastructure.

vq