GSOC Application

[Bradley Giesbrecht]

Regards,
Bradley Giesbrecht (pixilla)




> On Mar 30, 2017, at 12:32 PM, Rainer Müller <raimue at macports.org> wrote:
> 
> Hello,
> 
> On 03/30/2017 04:04 PM, Chinmaya Bhat wrote:
>> I am Chinmaya, a third-year Computer Science student at BMSIT, Bangalore. I am
>> new to MacPorts. I can code in C and Python and am going through the Tcl
>> tutorial on the GSOC wiki. 
>> I have installed MacPorts and am reading the documentation provided.
> 
> Thank you for your interest in MacPorts! That already seems like a good start.
> 
>> I'm interested in implementing the task "Improve fetching from version control"
>> and I have read through the trac ticket <https://trac.macports.org/ticket/16373>
>> provided with it.
> 
> As noted in the Trac ticket, I implemented parts of this last year during the
> MacPorts meeting together with Mojca.
> 
> This can be found on the vcs-fetch branch of macports-base:
> https://github.com/macports/macports-base/compare/vcs-fetch
> 
> The implementation already works for git and creates reproducible tarballs with
> its internal 'git archive' command. However, nothing has yet been done for other
> version control systems. I think it would be preferable that all fetch.types for
> VCS work the same, therefore I did not merge it yet.
> 
> The idea is that for the fetch.types for VCS, port automatically generates a
> tarball in the fetch phase. It also sets the distfiles option such that
> subsequent checksum and extract phases work like for every other port. Such a
> Portfile will then always require checksums. Therefore, the generated tarball
> has to be reproducible, which means the process in the fetch phase will have to
> always generate the exact same byte-to-byte identical tarball.
> 
>> However, I dont understand how to implement it. 
>> Where are the distfiles and work dir located? 
> 
> Ports that use a fetch.type for a VCS do not have any explicit distfiles, but
> the filename of the tarball is implicitly taken from its name and VCS
> tag/revision. The work dir is created when building a port locally.
> 
> Read through the explanations of the different phases to understand how a port
> is built:
> https://guide.macports.org/#reference.phases
> 
>> Do I need to edit the Portfile of every application individually to check for
>> the latest working copy?
> 
> The Portfiles will need additional checksums for the generated tarballs, but
> everything else should still work as it is now.
> 
>> Also, do I need to know cvs/svn/hg/bzr ? I know git and nothing about the rest.
> 
> Knowledge about these tools can be acquired during the task. There is no
> requirement of knowing them before starting with this. Mainly you will only have
> to know about how to clone or checkout a working copy, for which the commands
> are already in the base code.
> 
> As a second step in this project, we will also want to provide these generated
> VCS tarballs on our mirrors. The port command should first try to fetch a
> generated tarball from our mirrors before attempting to generate a tarball
> locally (reducing dependencies, avoiding firewalls for git:// protocol, etc).

Would the buildbots upload the tarballs to the MacPorts mirrors?

—
Brad