Framing the MacPorts discussion

[Enrico Maria Crisostomo]

Hi all,

I've got an iMac Pro in my LAN with 16 vCores and 64GB or RAM which is
quite often idle.
I'm not privy with how our build system work, but if we could get to a
point where agents can be added, stopped, throttled, trusted members of our
community could volunteer the computational power they have at their
disposal without fully dedicating a machine.
In my specific case: I'm happy to offer VMs on that machine to volunteer
computational resources.

On Wed, May 19, 2021 at 7:38 PM Andrew Janke <floss at apjanke.net> wrote:

> 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>
> 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>
> 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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