HOWTO: Get started, gain macports-foo, make bad first impression

[Jay Levitt]

Rainer Müller wrote:
> Ryan Schmidt wrote:
>> The other problem with parallel builds is that they are not identical  
>> each time you run them. The build may succeed 3 times, then fail the  
>> 4th. I personally haven't had the time to try to build each of my  
>> ports several times with parallel build on to see if they repeatably  
>> build correctly.
> 
> If the port does not build correctly the dependencies in the Makefile 
> are wrong. If it ever fails for someone and he/she files some ticket it 
> can be disabled. Usually there is no need to test it multiple times or 
> something like that.

I think "multiple times" may be a proxy for "under slightly different 
circumstances that trigger race conditions"...

> As I said before in other emails, we will not be able to provide 
> packages for each and every variant combination (that would be 2^n for a 
> port with n variants). So building custom ports on the end-user side 
> will still happen even once we ship binary packages for default_variants.

Good point.  If you can hit 80% of the user base with binary builds, 
you've made a lot of people very happy.

(That said, I am very pleased with the build speed on my shiny new 
dual-quad-core-Xeon 3.2GHz Mac Pro with 16GB RAM, four Cheetah 15K.5 SAS 
drives, and ccache enabled.  I just want to throw that out there.  You 
know, as a data point.)


Jay