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

[Mojca Miklavec]

On 29 September 2016 at 22:10, Leonardo Brondani Schenkel wrote:
> On 2016-09-29 21:51, Lawrence Velázquez wrote:
>>
>> 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.
>
> Two general questions, and a concrete one:
>
> 1. Should I open a ticket when a build broke to track the progress of fixing
> it?

Yes.

But in case a build is (known to be) broken on PPC and if there is no
easy way to fix it, you can just as well make that clear in the
portfile itself. There's no real need to worry too much about such an
old platform.

> 2. In case a package simply cannot be built in an unsupported version/ arch
> of OS X (because upstream won't fix it and I don't know how to fix it), is
> it possible to blacklist that combination on the Portfile so the buildbot
> won't attempt to build it and/or users will be notified if they try to
> install that package on that combination?

See the thread "Determine before installation whether a port can be installed"

https://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macports-dev/2016-July/033286.html

(It's inconveniently spread among several months.)

> 3. In my specific case I'm a bit confused since the two missing symbols
> *are* defined in neomutt source code: 'safe_malloc' is in lib.c and
> 'strndup' in strndup.c. I can see both files being compiled
> (https://build.macports.org/builders/ports-10.5_ppc_legacy-builder/builds/5905/steps/install-port/logs/stdio)
> so I can't explain why later they are not found.

The following command doesn't link against lib.o though:

/usr/bin/gcc-4.2 -std=gnu99  -pipe -Os -arch ppc  -L/opt/local/lib
-Wl,-headerpad_max_install_names -arch ppc -L/opt/local/lib
-L/opt/local/lib -L/opt/local/lib -L/opt/local/lib -o mutt_dotlock
mutt_dotlock.o strndup.o strnlen.o wcscasecmp.o regex.o


> When I feel that I need a
> second pair of eyes, like in this case, should I prefer to contact first the
> -user or -devel lists or upstream?

I would suggest macports-devel and/or upstream.

This is not something that plain users should be concerned about, it's
clearly a "developer" issue. Whether asking on the -devel mailing list
or upstream depends a bit on situation. You could do both.

Mojca