Buildbot idea(s) for GSOC

[Jackson Isaac]

Hi,

On Thu, Mar 8, 2018 at 9:15 PM, Umesh Singla <umeshksingla at macports.org> wrote:
> Hi Mojca
>
> See inline.
>
> On Wed, Mar 7, 2018 at 3:22 AM, Mojca Miklavec <mojca at macports.org> wrote:
>>
>> Dear Umesh,
>>
>> In case we would get any good students in that area, I would be
>> grateful if someone would work on improving buildbot core & front-end
>> in close collaboration with mentors directly from buildbot.
>>
>> I added this one idea on the list, but it needs some polishing:
>>     https://trac.macports.org/wiki/SummerOfCode#Buildbotideas
>>
>> However, in order to attract potential students, we would likely need
>> to add a few suitable keywords to our "description", like perhaps
>> "frontend". But we would also need to make it easier for such students
>> who end up on our site to actually spot such projects without browsing
>> through the full list.
>
>
> I can add some tags like frontend or javascript on GSoC website to include
> MacPorts in the search results. Probably the tag "End User Applications"
> doesn't help much.

Feel free to add relevant tags.

>
> Maybe, we can divide the project list into 3 sections - infrastructure based
> projects, macports-base and ports (or documentation-based as well?). Trac,

Sounds great. It would be more organized and easy to search for the people
visiting the site for the first time. Initially, even I had to read
through a page
few times to understand the things better.

> as compared to other orgs' fancy websites these days, doesn't help much to
> attract students (one simple reason could be very small fonts or not easily
> searchable). I couldn't have chosen any project, if it wasn't for Jackson
> who helped me out last year.

Thanks! Such kind words keeps the community motivated :) Feel free to share
a bier or two from the Meeting (qty. measured in dozen(s)) ;)

>
> The ideas which are not finalized or are still being discussed can be put on
> to some other page or where mentors are not available for that year.
> Something like general MacPorts projects and current year eligible-GSoC
> projects.
>
>>
>> Buildbot participated in GSOC before, but did not apply this year.
>> They would be willing to mentor and we really need some features
>> implemented if we want to go for buildbot 1.0 setup one day. (That
>> said, I would find it ok even if some project from buildbot mentorship
>> is not strictly macports-oriented.)
>

We can add them as secondary mentors advising on the project.

Even for my project, we contributed to external project, namely libsolv.
We kept a copy for ourselves to adapt to our needs and opened a PR on
upstream. It was upto the external project on which parts they would want
to merge into upstream (since we had macports specific code).

The evaluation and organizational procedures would still be with us, AFAIK.

>
> I'll add someone's name from Buildbot to the project you added (I think
> Pierre Tardy agreed to mentor?) along with "from Buildbot community" in the
> description. But I'd say we should work on what exactly we mean by "make
> Buildbot 1.0 a lot more useful for MacPorts". I haven't gone through the
> threads about Buildbot on this list, maybe will do now.
>

That would be great.

Probably we can get a confirmation from Buildbot team as to who would
be interested and suitable mentor for the project.

>>
>> Another project we could put on the list would be figuring out how to
>> start clean VMs for each build, but that might be tricky and the
>> student would need to be able to figure that out on his own.
>> Apparently buildbot supports that for Linux.
>
>
> Not sure but can Jenkins help here? Usually you need a yaml file and a xml
> file and provides quite a number of plugins to customize unlike Travis. It
> would be a big shift though.
>

It's about time to get DevOps skills here ;)

BTW, I hope everyone is ready for the MPM 2018. Hope to join remotely.

Mojca,

Any plans for remote session ? Would be great to have some details
about it in advance, so interested people can plan accordingly.

-- 
Jackson Isaac