It is now an hassle to build all the minitage dependencies by hand.

Naturally, the idea to set up some tinderbox like buidbot comes to my mind.

More over, i had a though of generating some binaries to avoid the compilation time for users who don't want to/can't compile.

The lead was to use collective.buildbot, a great recipe to integrate buildbot with zc.buildout deployment.

The result is there : http://git.minitage.org/git/minitage/buildbot/

The idea was to generate a "collective.buildbot" project per dependency. To achieve that, i made a script to generate those projects from the current official minilays.

Compilation is triggered via manual activation (irc, web) but also by a cron scheduler (nearly each 3 hours)

I made a patch to the recipe to have multiple hours values (* 1,2,3 * * *) cron entries, see http://git.minitage.org/git/minitage/buildbot/tree/collective.buildbot.multiple.patch

The buildbot can be viewed there : http://www.minitage.org/buildbot/waterfall

Next steps are to finnish the "binaries dealing" in minitage.core and the mirrors setup, and minitage users will be able to use binaries and no compilation anymore :)

Thanks to a workmate, Jean-Philippe, who shared me a little space of it's Osx Leopard based laptop, i could test minitage on Leopard.

I was surprised to not see a lot of breakages. Most of the packages build fine right now.

I was just anooyed with 'MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET' bugs i introduced with previous minitage versions, where i didnt know already all the impact of using it.

So, now, is minitage ready for mac ?

I think, Yes as almost everything inside minitage can install without problems. But ..., it needs to be tested a lot more :)

And think, that you must run OSX Leopard. Prior versions of MacOSX wont be supported. Indeed, i need some linker features which need a lot of rewrites of minitage composants  to be compliant with the old mac linker. (-Wl,-rpath -Wl,... -> -rpath something). Whereas, now, a lot can be fixed in one place, the project has history and there is a lot of places to fix and test to rewrite this "flag issue". But if you want, port it ;)

One recommandation if you use minitage on OSX is to use the boostrapper to get the base python compiled with the right options.

If you get some obscure  errors like:

distutils.errors.DistutilsPlatformError: $MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET mismatch: now "10.3" but "10.5" during configure

use the bootstrapper ;)

 You ll need also xcode and some tools installed, see on the minitage installation documentation : http://minitage.org/installation.html

I finnished ysterday to make the neccessary patches to make compile all dependencies on the minitage tree on linux 64 bits.

The guest OS is a debian etch 64.

There were some trivial fixes, mainly the whole packages compiled without any problems.

One reason among others  why i love gentoo.

• I got some troubles packaging a package on minitage for its x64 port.
• I looked the gentoo's relevant ebuild.
• I found some interresting patch, i integrated it on the libjpeg buildout.
• I launched the minimerge dance, Et voila, bug resolved !

Thx gentoo and thx gentoo developpers :-)

This website just got updated to latest plone available... There may be bugs with quills ... :)