emacs-app-devel build fail on master not detected by buildbot

[Nathaniel W Griswold]

I use the subport emacs-app-devel (subport of emacs) on my 10.15 Catalina system (with variants +imagemagick, +rsvg). The build failed during my last port upgrade outdated and i investigated why.

The external git mirror (https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs.git) has exceeded 1000 new commits since the commit referenced by the Portfile (80e26472206cc44837521ba594cd50e724d9af5c). Since the clone produced from the Portfile uses depth 1000, This means that port cannot check out that commit in its local checkout and the port build fails on that step.

I thought about it a bit and i feel like if the logic to trigger a build is already Portfile-aware this could be detected with a small change to the system. If a git clone with a —depth=${val} is found in the Portfile for a port or subport, then the build system could trigger a build periodically at some rate that doesn’t stress the build setup too much. I don’t know how many Portfiles have `git clone —depth=${val} ${repo}` git.url values but if there aren’t that many you could trigger these builds quite often.

I will increase the depth to 3000 for now and submit my updated Portfile.

Thank you

Nate