Packaging buildbot-www

[Mojca Miklavec]

Dear Rajdeep,

[Removing the -users mailing list as regular users should not be
concerned with ugly implementation details of MacPorts :), and CC-ing
Karan, Renee & Cyril.]

On Tue, 28 May 2019 at 08:56, Rajdeep Bharati wrote:
>
> Dear developers,
>
> I am packaging buildbot 2.x as a port. However, a key part of buildbot 2 is the web interface, buildbot-www, which uses many javascript dependencies (those aren't available as MacPorts packages yet). Please find the attached image which shows the dependencies.
>
> https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CnjcmMvd4fsXtJqhjrTRGVC0Rfn2s9gW/view
>
>  Screenshot 2019-05-28 at 11.36.55 AM.png
>
> What would be the right way to package this? Would it be a python port?
> Would it be better to package all of the above JS libraries?
>
> It would be great if someone could throw some light on this.
>
> Thanks and Regards
> Rajdeep

If I didn't make an "OCR error" myself, here's the list of packages in
plain text:
jquery, angular, angular-animate, angular-bootstrap,
angular-ui-router, angular-recursion, loadash, guanlecoja-ui, moment,
d3, font-awesome, bootstrap, buildbot-data,
angular-bootstrap-multiselect

I'm not entirely sure about the best strategy either. It would
definitely make sense to check what other distributions are doing and
also get recommendations from buildbot developers. I'm pretty sure
that FreeBSD, Debian, RedHat etc. all package buildbot and it would
make sense to check what package dependencies they declare / what
files the packages install.

I would say that it sounds acceptable to install those dependencies on
the fly and mention installation instructions in port notes as the
first step (I'm just not sure where to install those files). I would
like to avoid you having to waste too much time trying to get all of
the javascript dependencies in place instead of spending some
productive time fixing bugs and implementing new functionality in
buildbot. Porting buildbot itself is one thing, dealing with a lot of
other unrelated dependencies something else, and one thing that we
already struggled with in the past, not being quite sure what
precisely to do.

On the other hand, this potentially sounds like a good real-world test
case for Karan who already wrote both npm backend for upt and the
macports frontend. I'm not sure how mature that code is and what Karan
is currently working on, but it might be worth trying it out.
(The following is meant more as a joke, I know that we don't have
nearly sufficient information available, but ideal upt
frontend/backend would already take care of all the dependency hell
and automatically declare & create also the javascript dependencies
for buildbot :) :) :)

Mojca