is macports getting rusty?

[Christopher Nielsen]

> The real improvement would be more buildbots, but that would take either a way of trusting volunteer buildbots (and that they were managed properly to produce fully correct results, and quite possibly dedicated to the purpose to avoid anything that would conflict or interfere), or an actual budget, or donated servers and server farm space, power, cooling, etc.

Back in May, @ryandesign mentioned that we have the option of upgrading our buildbot farm with more powerful CPUs. Said farm is currently hosted on Xserves, and since the CPUs are socketed, it’s reasonably straightforward.

Ultimately I’m hoping that Apple might donate one or more rack-mount MacPros though, as a few of those fully-loaded beasts would provide a nice upgrade.

But overall, our present setup still works quite well. And most of the time, the buildbots are able to keep up with the flurry of commits that occur each day.

> Another improvement might be more people qualified, trusted, and authorized to babysit the buildbots, and/or automatic tickets on failed builds, since if a build on a buildbot fails, it's either a problem with the buildbot or with the port itself; and in the latter case, those building themselves will also have the problem.

The good news is that there are already a number of us who monitor the buildbots, as well as port builds in-general. Time is spent informally, on an as-available basis, and there are certainly times when failures go unnoticed. But for heavily-used ports, build failures are generally caught quickly.