[mapserver-dev] MapServer docs and GitHub Process

[Jeff McKenna]

Hi Seth,

Thanks for mentioning this.  Indeed about 6 months ago I set up the 
backport bot for the documentation, but I didn't seem to pull the final 
trigger (this is usually a sign that I had hit a wall).

I've gone through and configured the backport bot for the documentation 
as well now (had a few failures but it's fixed now).

Some other points:
- updated Github settings so that 'master' is now default branch for 
documentation, and changed the message to say to submit PRs to master
- I also took this time to finally change our old "docs" repository name 
(this goes way back to our CVS days) to something more meaningful: 
"MapServer-documentation".  Github handles the appropriate redirects. 
(https://github.com/MapServer/MapServer-documentation)
- did the same for our "mapserver" Github organization, so that it is 
now "MapServer" (https://github.com/MapServer)
- I've enabled that Github action 'check-crlf' for the documentation 
workflow, and changed all remaining CRLF linefeeds in the documentation 
files, to LF.  Now, when you submit a PR or a push, this checks the 
entire repository for any CRLF linefeeds, and reports a list of files 
with problems, or states "no files with CRLF endings found"
- also added the git settings that I use locally, to convert to LF 
before commit, to our documentation guide, and made a note of this LF 
requirement (see third point at 
https://mapserver.org/development/documentation.html#github-notes ). 
But this new Github action will nicely tell us about the linefeed 
problem, thanks Seth for mentioning it!
- regarding the source code directory, I also tried to enable the 
check-crlf, and it found a surprising number of source code files with 
non-LF, but for it to work we'll have to ignore some directories and 
filetypes (such as msautotest, pdfs, etc).  There is also a PR for 
check-crlf that adds this, and once that is accepted I'll add this into 
the main source repository as well.

In summary, we can now use the 'backport branch-7-6' label for 
documentation, and, all pull requests should now we made to master.  All 
documentation pull requests are now checked for linefeeds, and a build 
error is thrown if CRLF are found.

Let me know if any other changes need to be made.

thanks!

-jeff


-- 
Jeff McKenna
MapServer Consulting and Training Services
co-founder of FOSS4G
http://gatewaygeo.com/



On 2020-09-19 6:38 p.m., Seth G wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> At the moment pull requests to https://github.com/mapserver/docs/ should be made to the latest active branch (currently 7.6). Documentation for new features however should be made to master (as they won't apply to new features).
> Sometimes it is difficult to know if a code change will be backported or not.
> 
> There are several pull requests that have been added to the 7.6 branch that are not in master, and some in master that are not in 7.6. I'm not sure how these possible conflicts are merged following a release (likely a painstaking manual process by Jeff?).
> 
> Would it make sense to follow the same development process as the MapServer codebase, and set up the GitHub "backport" bot? Then if code is backported the doc pull request can be too, and master will contain all updates.
> 
> Seth
> 
> 
> --
> web:http://geographika.co.uk
> twitter: @geographika