[Qgis-psc] Continuous Deployment for OSGeo4W

[Jürgen E. Fischer]

Hi Matthias,

On Mon, 11. Jun 2018 at 14:17:37 +0200, Matthias Kuhn wrote:
> Looking at the core team page of the project [1], there are 3 people
> involved, 2 of them packaging and one of them taking the big share of things.
> Thank you Jürgen ;-)

That page isn't well maintained either - Matt has been off the radar for long.

 
> The infrastructure in the background is to my knowledge not documented and we
> are happy if it just works. And if it breaks if there is someone with
> knowledge and access rights to fix things.

The OSGeo4W infrastructure is download.osgeo.org.  It's documented in the trac
wiki.  The only required access right is a osgeo id with shell access.

There's no building infrastructure.  So maintainers have to build their
packages on their own machine and upload them.  Some of the package (most of
mine for instance) also contain (-src) packages with the build recipes for the
package.

But there currently is no "standardized" way to invoke them, upload the package
and run the packaging scripts.  The build recipes are diverse and use cmake,
nmake, ninja, gnu make, batch files, shell scripts (cygwin/mingw) and use
several different version of compilers (multiple versions of MSVC & mingw gcc).
Some even require third party SDKs that cannot be redistributed.  There's no
base build system or way to install build dependencies.

AFAIK automated packages only exists for QGIS, GDAL and GRASS - those run on
internal infrastructure (here inhouse for QGIS/GDAL and I think at the
university Martin works for GRASS) and upload the results.


> I just stumbled upon a repository from Oslandia [2] that streamlines the
> packaging and integrates it with continuous deployment apparently.

Odd that you had to stumbled upon it - this was also presented and discussed at
the Madeira hackfest and it's one of the benifits of moving from github to
gitlab.

But it currently also depends on internal build servers (at oslandia).  It
doesn't upload to the osgeo4w repository, but integrates the repository and has
utility scripts to invoke the build, harvest the packages and add them to taht
repository.  So the current packaging scripts would have to be adapted.


> Having such a repository under QGIS or OSGeo umbrella could help to take away
> the burden of maintaining the Windows distribution from very few people,
> having a pull request review scheme as we have for source code and distribute
> the responsibility.

> In short, having a repository where package scripts and build scripts are
> publicly available, forkable, builds are reproducible and where it's possible
> to make pull requests.

> The main question in the first line is probably, is that something which is
> considered a QGIS task, an OSGeo task or a task that individual companies
> should be taking?

This might introduce a long enough pole to make it bearable for more devs to
touch windows and get more contributors for OSGeo4W. ;)

If we wouldn't need (to spend funds on) windows licenses to get this to fly, we
might already have public build machines.  And those seems to be the current
missing bits.


Jürgen


-- 
Jürgen E. Fischer           norBIT GmbH             Tel. +49-4931-918175-31
Dipl.-Inf. (FH)             Rheinstraße 13          Fax. +49-4931-918175-50
Software Engineer           D-26506 Norden             http://www.norbit.de
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