Framing the MacPorts discussion

[Andrew Janke]

I have a small stack of Mac Minis I got to use as a buildbot farm for 
Octave.app; I might be able to have them pull double duty for MacPorts 
depending on your change volume.

Cheers,
Andrew

On 5/19/21 1:16 PM, Mark Anderson wrote:
> Yeah - we are certainly short staffed everywhere - I try to add more 
> and more of my time to the project but aside from my ports, I'm still 
> in learning mode digging through all the asciidoc and tcl and 
> everything. I'm trying to build some tools to help me, but again, more 
> time.
>
> Once we move to the latest build bot, we might want to see if we can 
> get other volunteers to host some hardware, but the problem is, we're 
> going to have to hit up ebay or something and the infrastructure will 
> be tougher.
>
> I'm honestly not sure how we can manage to staff up more at all - I 
> mean this is a FOSS problem all over for non-company sponsored projects.
>
> —Mark
> _______________________
> Mark E. Anderson <mark at macports.org <mailto:mark at macports.org>>
> MacPorts Trac WikiPage <https://trac.macports.org/wiki/mark>
> GitHub Profile <https://github.com/markemer>
>
>
>
> On Tue, May 18, 2021 at 2:35 AM Ryan Schmidt <ryandesign at macports.org 
> <mailto:ryandesign at macports.org>> wrote:
>
>     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.
>

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