[Qgis-psc] [QGIS-Developer] Direct push forbidden to master

[Matthias Kuhn]

Hi,

I think this discussion was triggered partially at least by my 
refactoring of the cmake build system. I am sorry for any inconveniences 
that this triggered and hope it's justified by the long term 
simplification that should come out of this.

Overall I see three different topics. One is the request for a Windows 
based CI, one is a rant over travis and CI in general and one is the 
question if direct pushes to master should be allowed (and encouraged).

A Windows based CI would in my opinion be highly desirable. I cannot see 
any reason not to do it actually. Most users run QGIS on Windows, that's 
just the reality. And we want QGIS to run stable on Windows. The 
questions that remain is how much $$ the infrastructure and it's setup 
is and if we get a Windows build system to complete in a reasonable 
time. I don't think nightly builds are equivalent, last week they were 
broken and it was up to one single person (Jürgen) to fix this. If a CI 
had been in place it would have been my job to fix the build before it 
is merged into our codebase, which would have been much more convenient 
for everyone. We also don't need all tests to pass on Windows to put 
this into play. We can blacklist some tests and gradually fix remaining 
ones. We have done that before on other platforms too.

If Travis (or any CI) is worth the effort is indeed a question that can 
and should be asked. It does require a lot of time to keep it up and 
running. What it provides on the other hand is an early feedback of 
regressions. And early in this case means detecting them before they 
even are in the codebase. This saves valuable time from our testers 
which can instead focus on testing things which have not been detected 
by the CI. And it saves time of core developers who don't need to fix 
bugs introduced by others. It also makes it easier to fix bugs because 
they are related to a particular pull request and context. Yes, travis 
also bitches around sometime and makes us loose time. I can't give a 
definite answer but in comparison with the wild west style before I am 
in favor of our CI.

Pushing directly to master is not a complete disaster, but I can't see 
many advantages of doing it. So far it's sort of a gentlemen agreement 
that most don't push directly to master. I don't remember the last time 
I did it actually. I am fine with restricting and enforcing this on 
github but if that's not desired by the PSC / Jürgen, I would like to 
appeal to everyone to keep away from doing direct pushes. Waiting an 
hour for a green tick shouldn't be asked too much.

-- Matthias

On 11/8/19 1:23 PM, Nathan Woodrow wrote:
> I agree with Even.  The issue here is the slow CI builds and lack of 
> Windows CI builds.
> To make this process smoother and more solid for everyone we need to 
> invest in better CI not pretend we can just ignore it for the sake of 
> getting a commit in..
>
> - Nathan
>
> On Fri, Nov 8, 2019 at 10:05 PM Even Rouault 
> <even.rouault at spatialys.com <mailto:even.rouault at spatialys.com>> wrote:
>
>     On vendredi 8 novembre 2019 19:32:06 CET Nyall Dawson wrote:
>     > On Fri, 8 Nov 2019 at 18:33, ElPaso <elpaso at itopen.it
>     <mailto:elpaso at itopen.it>> wrote:
>     > > I'm with Jürgen on this, I think we all are responsible developers
>     > > acting for the good of QGIS and I didn't see any abuse on
>     direct commits
>     > > in the past few years.
>     > >
>     > >
>     > > On the contrary, I think I should have committed to master
>     directly to
>     > > correct a PR of mines that I merged by mistake the day before 3.10
>     > > release (https://github.com/qgis/QGIS/pull/32369) instead of
>     waiting for
>     > > an approval that didn't arrive in time (in this case it wasn't
>     really a
>     > > big problem though).
>     >
>     > I don't think Denis is arguing for forced-reviews of pull requests.
>     > Rather just that all changes GO through pull requests so that we can
>     > be sure they don't break CI.
>
>     What is obvious here is that a CI for Windows would avoid avoided
>     this case,
>     as the cost of maintaining the Windows build alive mostly relies
>     on a single
>     person currently.
>     As it seems that most QGIS users run Windows, it might be worth
>     for the
>     project to invest into that, both in funding the time of the folks
>     who would
>     set up that and possibly paying for a beefy enough server
>     (potentially from a
>     commercial CI hosting solution) that would sustain the load of
>     pull requests.
>
>     And paying for Travis extra build could potentially save time for
>     a number of
>     contributors. For the github OSGeo organization, mostly used by
>     PROJ & GDAL,
>     it is between 4000-5000 USD/year for 11 parallel builds (this
>     includes a
>     discount for OSGeo being a non-profit). There might be cheeper
>     alternatives by
>     other competitors.
>
>     -- 
>     Spatialys - Geospatial professional services
>     http://www.spatialys.com
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