[users at bb.net] Buildbot on Mac OS X

[Charles Lepple]

> On Jan 26, 2016, at 8:21 AM, Craig Treleaven wrote:
> 
>> On Jan 26, 2016, at 8:09 AM, Amar Takhar wrote:
>> 
>> On 2016-01-26 07:56 -0500, Craig Treleaven wrote:
>>> Hi:
>>> 
>>> I???m attempting to set up a Mac OS X buildbot slave for the MythTV project.  
>>> They haven???t had a Mac builder for several years and so I need to 
>>> temporarily set up a buildbot master to work out the build process.  However, 
>>> my initial attempts have been stymied by the sqlalchemy / sqlalchemy-migrate 
>>> situation.
>> <snip>
>> 
>> Awesome, they really need it.
>> 
>> I run a lot of Mac workers I have only had luck running in a stable fashion 
>> by using virtualenv and having pip or setup.py install all the dependencies for 
>> me.
>> 
>> I would try that rather than relying on macports or another package manager.
> 
> I may end up doing that but, as I said, I’m involved in the MacPorts project and if our buildbot install is broken, I’d like to get it fixed.
> 

I ran into this a few years ago with the Fink package of Buildbot. The slave side is easy - there usually isn't a very tight dependency on specific versions of Twisted. However, updating the dependencies of the master involves potentially coordinating with every other maintainer who might be affected, and I think sqlalchemy-migrate was the straw that broke the camel's back. One package with a fixed version dependency shouldn't hold back all of the other packages in the distribution.

Maybe there is less overhead in MacPorts for setting up a buildbot-specific installation of the necessary sqlalchemy/-migrate packages?

(FWIW, I use virtualenv and pip for the master, and I create "packages" of the known-good installs by maintaining a history of tarballs - not pretty, but it works. I figure I am only maintaining one instance of the master, versus potentially many slaves.)

-- 
Charles Lepple
clepple at gmail