Factors determining binary archivability

[Joshua Root]

On 2020-9-7 05:50 , Jason Liu wrote:
> So, I'm curious what factors determine whether a particular port becomes
> available as a binary archive. Since the Blender port I submitted is
> pretty large and complex, I'm assuming that one factor may be that a
> package takes too long to build and simply times out? (The Azure builds
> in my PR took 2-3 hours to complete, and the Travis builds all timed out
> after 50 minutes.) I've noticed that some other large/complex
> applications, which typically have a long list of dependencies, also
> don't have binary archives, and are always built from source on MacPorts
> clients (e.g., gimp, inkscape, vlc).
> 
> Is it an issue of the builders simply not being able to finish the
> builds before timing out? is it the number, or maybe a certain type, of
> dependencies that rules a package out? is it the project's license, as
> mentioned on this page
> <https://guide.macports.org/chunked/using.binaries.html>? or are there
> other factors that determine whether a binary archive can be made
> available? Is there anything that I can do as a portfile writer to help
> encourage a package to be available as a binary download?

Unlike the CI systems used for PRs, which we don't own, builds can take
as long as they need to on our buildbot. (There is a timeout if the
build produces no output for hours, but that isn't usually an issue.)

Assuming a port builds on a given platform, binary availability is
purely a matter of licenses. Normally you could inspect the build logs
at <https://ports.macports.org/port/blender/builds> to see why binaries
were not uploaded, but in this case there was no build because of a
GitHub webhook delivery failure.

I redelivered it and the builds should be happening soon.

- Josh