Re: Testing Setup - More Tests and Automation?

[v <vsochat@gmail.com>]

Hi Mark,

I appreciate you keeping your opinion about GitHub and dislike separate
from an overall evaluation of what is best for the project. There are
things that I don't like too, but I recognize the value for other
developers or (in this case) growing a community.

That shows the same thing "Sign in to view logs".
>
> Yes indeed you need an account! So we can remove our personal biases (I
think sourceware is a PITA) and look at actual data to see where developers
are developing. I think sourceware has ~40 projects
<https://sourceware.org/projects.html>? How many users? Maybe a couple of
hundred? Or maybe a thousand? Well GitHub has over 70 million users and
more than 200 million repos. I suspect you'll find more people on there
than sourceware, but just an educated guess :) Developers aren't going to
go out of their way to come to your project, you have to meet them where
they are at. We can put aside our personal feelings about particular tools
and recognize that.

I have contributed to some projects that use github (see e.g. rpm or
> gccrust) but found it a major pita to be honest. Their website
> basically doesn't work without javascript.


Probably 1% (or fewer) users browse with JavaScript disabled (reference
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9478737/browser-statistics-on-javascript-disabled).
I only do it when I want to get beyond a paywall  :)  Again, I understand
we all have personal preferences, but sometimes our preferences can get in
the way of what is best for a project or community (or growing one when
it's largely absent).

And you have to depend on
> people having a github account to do pull requests or accept patches
> for you.


Many developers feel differently than you and love GitHub. I can say the
same about libabigail - not only do I need to join an email list (that
doesn't support basic stuff like adding images) the git repository (that is
hard to find) looks like this:
https://sourceware.org/git/gitweb.cgi?p=libabigail.git. I can't easily open
an issue to ask a question, contribute a pull request, or even browse the
source code and derive relationships between things (e.g., GitHub can allow
you to click a function and be taken to the definition and other nice
features). I totally get and respect that you don't have (and do not want)
a GitHub account, but many developers do, and have been using it over a
decade (myself included). I think there is something to say for choosing
the preferences of the majority of people that are potentially developers
for your project?


> Maybe it works better if you are able to create an account
> and don't mind running all this proprietary javascript. But the legal
> language involved in creating one is so large that I cannot even tell
> if it is acceptable or not.
>
> The legal language? I'm not sure I follow here, because your company
(RedHat) has many GitHub users and repos. I am not a lawyer so possibly you
can talk to one at RedHat if you have concerns. But the fact that major
tech companies not just allow but champion their developers to work on
GitHub suggests to me that lawyers have probably already looked and think
it's okay. And for putting code online, generally companies have a process
for making code public, and I suspect you've already done that with
libabigail since it's online.


> I happen to work for Red Hat myself as day job. But not directly
> on libabigail, nor on any project that uses github. I know it is
> possible to extract some stuff from github, I do keep some mirrors in
> my own git setup https://code.wildebeest.org/ so I can sent patches
> or pull requests. But I don't find the experience of interacting with
> github using projects great.
>
>
Again, the majority of developers do find the experience great, and it's
important to separate our personal opinions from what is best for the
project, which is to consider the practices of the bulk majority of
developers (that you'd want to help with your project).


> I agree it would be good to have more active developers. I doubt it
> matters whether or not the project has a github webpage. For me
> personally I stopped most contributions since the licence
> change. Which might or might not be a factor to others. Personally I
> like contributing to projects that use strong copyleft.
>
>
Great! It does matter where the project is, because where it is has
implications for 1. finding it, 2. seeing the branding and feeling that it
is modern and welcoming, and 3. being able to easily open an issue to ask a
question or fork and then contribute. It's not that sourceware is bad, but
that it uses practices that the majority of developers are not familiar
with, and although it's not easily apparent (it's hard to notice absence of
things) but the absence of contributors to your project I do believe is
based on this choice. I think you probably don't have a large enough
developer base (and perhaps I'm the first person to ask for this migration)
but it's fairly common for developers to make this ask, e.g,
https://www.wired.com/story/open-source-all-about-github-now/.

I am not sure that libabigail and podman are comparable projects. But
> I get that there are ways to interact with the project on the github
> website that you prefer to interacting with the libabigail project?
>
> Yes! I can open issues, and I can browse code and click on functions to
navigate to their definition, I can easily fork, make a change, and open a
pull request, click next to any line of code to create a permalink to
reference elsewhere, copy the line, see the git blame or to open an issue,
I can create milestones, discussions, and automate everything from the docs
deployment to linting and building containers (or other artifacts)
alongside the repository, I can reference issues / lines or full sections
in issues or discussions (even from other projects), I can use images /
other media in all places, I can get automatic security alerts based on
dependencies in my repo, I can automate my release process and generate
release notes automatically based on the commit history, and don't even get
me started on how amazing it is to use the API - I can automate everything!
I have entire websites that are generated from data that is updated via a
workflow nightly and rendered without a hitch. And you can add a CNAME to a
repository and get your documentation deployed without a hitch (https works
out of the box!) And deploying documentation to GitHub pages is literally
pushing files to a branch (or subdirectory) and calling it a day. I (and
many others) feel empowered by what we can do, and it's really more of a
question of what we can't do? [reference modern-practices]


> So which changes would you like to see? Note that I don't mind a forge
> like setup, I just think that github is a pretty bad one. But
> something like sourcehut, self-hosted gitlab or pagure would be pretty
> cool.


I think I've expressed in the sections above what I'd like to see. I think
if libabigail is to grow the community of developers you have to go where
they are. Personally speaking, to contribute to libabigail I want to
continue to use all of the above.


> I do think adding automated testing is a pretty valuable thing,
> especially if contributors can use it as pre-commit gating, which is
> why I am working on adding buildbot and container based automation to
> sourceware for all project hosted there. So I am a bit surprised you
> believe that isn't part of the solution.
>
> I made all the workflows / containers for Ben for libabigail in like a day
(you can pull from GitHub packages, e.g.,)

docker run -it ghcr.io/woodard/libabigail:latest

and they are hosted alongside the repository (another amazing feature, out
of the box!). I think it's great you are thinking about this (and it's part
of the automation solution, for sure) but not part of the "grow a community
and get people excited about libabigail." What is your plan for that?


> Is that because they don't use email, bugzilla or irc? Do you think we
> should have some kind of web-forum for the project?
>
> I think you should have the project on GitHub :) Nobody wants another
niche account / service they have to create (speaking for the majority of
developers already on GitHub that don't find it a PITA).


> Would their opinion change if they realize libabigail is mirrored on
> sourcehut already?
>
>
I don't even know what sourcehut is and I'm afraid to look. 😆


> > In other words, you are 100% losing out in terms of new contributors and
> > developers by not using these modern practices and services.
>
> Which modern practices and services are those exactly?
>

See [reference modern-practices] above. That's probably a shortened list.

I hope you can help and I hope we can provide you with the tools to do so.
>
> If I need to do something special for libabigail it's unlikely, but thank
you for the sentiment! If things stay the same the most I'll contribute is
probably working with Ben via his repo, which has been pretty fun :) But
that is because I know Ben and was able to find it, and I suspect others
won't do the same.

Best,

Vanessa