Why do so many builds fail?

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Mar 9, 2016, at 2:05 AM, Bachsau <web at bachsau.name> wrote:

> Today I was running an upgrade and it failed building webkit2-gtk and I'm somewhat pissy about this, as I don't want to be forced debugging ports before I can continue with my coding. Is there any stable release of macports or and how comes that buggy ports make it into the ports tree all the time? Doesn't anyone ever test his creations before publishing them?

Sorry for the trouble. Of course we want your experience with MacPorts to be trouble-free, but we cannot guarantee that it will be, and problems do occur from time to time. When they do, please submit a bug report in the issue tracker.

Yes, everyone tests their changes before committing. But they probably only test on their own system. It may be that a build fails only on certain versions of OS X, or certain versions of Xcode, or only when certain other ports were already installed. There are countless possible reasons for a build failure. In each case, we must diagnose the issue and fix it.

There is no "stable" release of MacPorts. Everything is provided as-is and best-effort. We are all volunteers, not being paid to work on this.