Semi-automating updates

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Mar 24, 2018, at 18:41, Michael Dickens wrote:

> The only other "gotcha" I wonder about is including buildbots for various target OSs [do PRs already go through building on (say) 10.6 and newer?]

The Buildbot is not currently involved in doing builds of PRs. There has been discussion on the mailing list about how that might be accomplished; see other thread.

Currently PRs are tested by a separate build infrastructure on Travis. It runs on three systems: Xcode 7.3 on OS X 10.11, Xcode 8.3 on macOS 10.12, and Xcode 9.3beta on macOS 10.13. These builds deliver different results than the Buildbot would. For example, if a port requires pkgconfig, and that dependency has not been declared, the build on the Buildbot will likely fail because pkgconfig is not there; the developer can notice this and correct the error. But on Travis, pkgconfig often gets installed as a dependency earlier in the process, so we won't notice if a port has failed to declare that dependency (until the PR gets merged and then built by the Buildbot). Another problem with the Travis setup is that because it starts from a clean slate every time, it has to install all dependencies first; if a dependency is nondistributable and has to be built from source, and especially if it is a large dependency, that can take more time than Travis allows, and the build times out; in that case, we have no information about whether the build would have succeeded or not, if allowed to finish.