So, I'm curious what factors determine whether a particular port becomes available as a binary archive. Since the Blender port I submitted is pretty large and complex, I'm assuming that one factor may be that a package takes too long to build and simply times out? (The Azure builds in my PR took 2-3 hours to complete, and the Travis builds all timed out after 50 minutes.) I've noticed that some other large/complex applications, which typically have a long list of dependencies, also don't have binary archives, and are always built from source on MacPorts clients (e.g., gimp, inkscape, vlc).
Is it an issue of the builders simply not being able to finish the builds before timing out? is it the number, or maybe a certain type, of dependencies that rules a package out? is it the project's license, as mentioned on this page <https://guide.macports.org/chunked/using.binaries.html>? or are there other factors that determine whether a binary archive can be made available? Is there anything that I can do as a portfile writer to help encourage a package to be available as a binary download? -- Jason Liu
