Framing the MacPorts discussion

[Ryan Schmidt]

MacPorts is short-staffed in all areas, not just infrastructure.

Our Buildbot system works. It produces all the binaries we are able to.

Our buildbot system was already substantially redesigned when we took it over from Apple in 2016 and will be substantially redesigned again as we upgrade to the latest version of the buildbot software.

We already have a small infrastructure team who are interested in working on improving the buildbot system and our other infrastructure, and do so.

We already use GitHub Actions for CI. We cannot use it to replace buildbot because it only offers recent OS versions and because it does not offer persistent machines.

I personally am not comfortable adding other build machines to our buildbot system that I do not control. When I control the machines, I know what is installed on them and that they are set up correctly. Having build machines located outside of my local network also poses additional challenges, as I've learned by having our Apple Silicon build machine outside of my network, challenges which I would prefer to minimize, not increase.

We currently use one build machine per OS version / arch, and have the hardware needed to do that. Adding more hardware such that we have more than one build machine per OS version / arch is not something our buildbot system was ever designed to accommodate, and would introduce problems.

Using Linux and commodity hardware is not applicable because it the macOS EULA only permits running macOS on Apple hardware, as we currently do.