MacPorts on multiple Macs

[Rodolfo Aramayo]

Ryan,

Buildbots are great and welcome and can produce binaries that can be
reliable used in different machines of the same 'uname -m'
architecture
BUT MacPorts is more than that
MacPorts does interact with directories outside '/opt/local' like the
'/Users/Applications/MacPorts'
And Macport cannot control UIDs which are locally assigned in most cases
A 'normal' user who would just rsync directories within machines
without taking, for example, UIDs into consideration can potentially
inadvertently create all sorts of 'invisible' issues and although
using the rsync parameter "rsync --chmod=ugo=rwX" which assigns the
same UIDs to files as the target directory, could work, personally I
have not tested this on 'live' MacPorts deployments
Unfortunately we do do have ways to testing these 'protocols' without
having to allocate significant amounts of resources AND time
I wonder if virtualization could help..............???

Thanks

--R

On Sat, Oct 13, 2012 at 3:57 AM, Ryan Schmidt <ryandesign at macports.org> wrote:
>
> On Oct 13, 2012, at 02:34, Rodolfo Aramayo wrote:
>
>> Hi Petra,
>>
>> Regarding your question
>>
>> Do not do that
>>
>> I currently manage >15 computers with MacPorts installed and I can
>> tell you that each machine is a universe on its own. Even those who
>> are 'identical' at the hardware and software level they are not really
>> absolutely equivalent and that depends on the software installed. In
>> the past I tried simplifying my life by designing strategies to keep
>> all 'identical' machines in sync, but it did not really work. I
>> observed very erratic and unexplained behaviors. The way I 'solved'
>> those problems is by installing everything locally on each machine and
>> letting each box compile its software
>>
>> Even little details like the order you created the users on the
>> machines can have drastic consequences for the assigned UIDs the
>> system gives each user and that can result in all kinds of unexpected
>> permission problems. Software updates by Apple could also change
>> according to the software installed on each machine from machine to
>> machine in ways we cannot really know in advance
>
> But... we have buildbots now. They build binaries and distribute them to users. Many users are using this successfully.
>
> Yes, there have been occasional problems with this too... But since this is a feature we're committed to continuing to provide, we'd like to resolve any such problems.
>
>
>