Semi-automating updates

[Perry E. Metzger]

It occurs to me that

1) Some ports have "livecheck", which is automated detection that an
   updated source file is available.
2) Some ports have "port test" automated testing available (though not
   many.)

It might therefore be interesting (though not a small amount of work)
to set something up so that, for ports with both livecheck and tests,
and where the maintainer consents, a service would look for updates,
and if one happened, it would create a Portfile with a properly bumped
revision number and updated checksums, run the automated tests, and if
they passed, submit a pull request on the maintainer's behalf. The
maintainer would be assigned the request so they could quickly check
why the update happened and decide if they wanted to proceed or not,
but that would be a few moments of work instead of a much more
significant amount of tedium.

Again, creating such a service would be no small amount of work, but
it would get rid of a great deal of tedium and make it much easier to
keep a large fraction of ports up to date with only a minute or two of
work once set up.

Presumably a port maintainer could indicate that they're happy with
this arrangement by setting a variable in their Portfile, which would
not work unless livecheck and test were also turned on. Such a scheme
really does require that tests be present, because without them,
there's no way to know that the robot is not requesting a pull for a
completely broken update.

(If the update doesn't build or test correctly on its own, presumably
the bot could inform the maintainer so they could clean up any
breakage manually.)

Anyway, do people think this is an interesting idea, or is it
nutty?

Perry
-- 
Perry E. Metzger		pmetzger at macports.org