GSoC 2019 [Collect build statistics]

[Mojca Miklavec]

On Sun, 24 Mar 2019 at 01:06, Craig Treleaven wrote:
>
> please note that we can’t expect all ports to build successfully on the buildbots.

Nobody said that, but we cannot blame the student collecting the data
from buildbot for macports internal deficiencies :)

> There are a number of ports that require a dependency to be installed with a non-default variant in order to build successfully.  A short-coming of MacPorts is that this cannot be done progammatically

This is a deficiency that could be fixed, but this is outside of scope
of this project. The project should still report the port as broken,
consistent to buildbot, it's then up to others to fix MacPorts. The
work done by Jackson in 2015 was supposed to address that, but it
turned out to be way more difficult than initially anticipated.

> When this is rolled out, we don’t want to make users think that a port will fail to build on their system when it is just a case of needing a non-default variant.
>
> However, I don’t know how to handle this cleanly.   Perhaps we could parse the build log looking for the message that informs the user how to install the required variant.  If found, instead of saying the build failed, we could indicate that the build was not attempted as the buildbot configuration could not support a successful install.

I totally agree with your request, but this is completely out of scope
of the proposed app. This either needs a proper extension in the base,
or a workaround in mpbb, preferably the former. I believe a much
bigger general issue is reporting failure of port builds on OSes which
are know not to be supported (like: attempting to build the latest Qt
on 10.5). Again, this needs to be addressed elsewhere.


What *might* need to be addressed here and has never been discussed so
far, is the fact that some ports install a different version of the
port, or different default variants, or need different dependencies,
based on OS version. If port Foo installs version 1.0 on 10.8 and
older, and version 2.0 on 10.9 and newer, it would be somewhat wrong
to treat version 1.0 as outdated. But treating this correctly without
too much overhead is somewhat tricky, and probably not something for
the first iteration either.

Mojca