KDE Moves To GitLab-Based CI, Lands More Plasma Wayland Fixes

[Michael_S]

Probably same as always. Don't get me wrong, I worked with Jenkins for quite a bit and I like a lot of its concepts, but Gitlab CI can do a lot of stuff (not as many as Jenkins that's for sure), but ends up being a whole lot clearer and easy to maintain solution in many scenarios.

People in the devOps area also complain about the Groovy language syntax. In Gitlab CI it's usually simple YAML file that's easy to write or correct by person without any previous experience with the tool. I was surprised how few lines of code I needed in order to get what I wanted. There's the price of elasticity though.

That makes sense. Also, there are odd corner cases in Jenkins configuration files where using specific types of Groovy language syntax will cause issues. We've learned how to work around it, but if other CI options had been as mature eight years ago we probably would have gone with something else.

But these days if I was setting up CI for a FOSS project, I'd be inclined to go with the CI in SourceHut. I haven't tried it yet, but it looks good.

[Citan]

Probably same as always. Don't get me wrong, I worked with Jenkins for quite a bit and I like a lot of its concepts, but Gitlab CI can do a lot of stuff (not as many as Jenkins that's for sure), but ends up being a whole lot clearer and easy to maintain solution in many scenarios.

People in the devOps area also complain about the Groovy language syntax. In Gitlab CI it's usually simple YAML file that's easy to write or correct by person without any previous experience with the tool. I was surprised how few lines of code I needed in order to get what I wanted. There's the price of elasticity though.

THIS.

The Lead Ops in my team is a VERY capable guy that never had any hesitation diving deep into something new and learn it, and so quickly grasped the basics of many tools we required him to set up... But Groovy has been a shit hole for him, only worse being bash scrips. Couldn't tell you why because it has been a long time since he explained why to me, but I remembered how tense he was about it even months after working with it. XD

As for bugtracker... Bugzilla was a great tool in its era, but now it's far too primitive in the default set up anyways. Gitlab offers...
- Integrated interface that tries to give a hint in "field separation based on importance of information", one may like or not but it's much more decisive anyways.
- Easier media support: nowadays giving information about a bug happening is sometimes much easier with images or even videos, especially on UX side.
- Extended markdown support with LOTS of plugins: the "mindmapping" in particular is situational, but god does it save your life when case arises. In general, you can cover a nice array of niche "types of information" without needing any further configuration.
- Cross integration: referencing a bug number in a commit immediately cross-references both ways. Of course you can achieve the same with BUgzilla (I mean I'm sure some plugin exists for that), but best case it requires finding the plugin, installing it and configuring it.

In fact' I think it's probably the whole "automatic cross-integration of information" part that was the winning piece. It's really pleasant in daily work.

[tildearrow]

KDE, please move your bug reporting away from Bugzilla. That's the biggest hurdle in stopping people from reporting bugs. For bugs to be fixed, we need to make the process of reporting them super easy. Bugzilla, IMO is unwelcoming.

Agreed. One thing I don't like about Bugzilla is that bugs do not have a description, because the description has to be a comment. This makes it look dirty and confusing...

KDE used to have a nice looking Bugzilla with a custom Oxygen theme and then a Breeze theme, but I think in 2016 or 2017 an upgrade broke it and to this day nobody has ever cared to fix it...

[Nth_man]

Curiously, today Nate Graham wrote:
25 ways you can contribute to KDE

https://pointieststick.com/2021/10/13/25-ways-you-can-contribute-to-kde/