how to handle 'internal' logs for failed builds

[Fred Wright]

On Thu, 4 Apr 2024, Chris Jones wrote:

[...]
> The problem is the contents of that log are, of course, not in the macports 
> build log, so I cannot see what it is that is causing it, and as it works for 
> me I cannot look locally myself. I've tried looking at my versions of the 
> logs, and just guess what might be wrong, missing new deps for instance, but 
> that hasn't worked, so I really need to see whats in that log from the build 
> bots...
[...]

In one sense, it seems rather dumb not to keep logs from failed builds. 
But since testing isn't the intended purpose of the buildbots, maybe that 
makes sense.  Perhaps it wouldn't be too difficult to add a feature to the 
buildbots where one could manually trigger a build with a "keeplogs" 
option.

Meanwhile, do the CI testers keep logs of failed builds?  I would think 
that the answer is yes.  If so, you should be able to get such a log just 
by submitting a dummy PR, provided that the failure occurs in one of the 
OS versions covered by the CI tests.


Speaking of buildbot logs, commit a269bae01e9 for legacy-support 
referenced a build log (as a comment in the Portfile) as the reason for 
disabling parallel builds, but that's now a broken link.  If a buildbot 
log is to be referenced in such a way, it should be copied to a more 
permanent location.  I can *sometimes* see a parallel build failure 
locally, which may or may not be the same bug, and there's no way to tell. 
Usually, those are caused by missing dependencies in the Makefile.

Fred Wright