KDE goals IRC office hour

[Adriaan de Groot]

On Sunday, 18 March 2018 11:43:00 CET, Ilmari Lauhakangas wrote:
> Thanks also to 
> Raphael Catolino for the original Docker work and for still 
> keeping at it. This is valuable not only for KDE, but for 
> LibreOffice as well while we evaluate this thing.

So I was just playing with the Janitor service. The KDE container is rather 
broken (no desktop shell packages installed, so you don't get a desktop or 
anything, and if the screen locker comes up, then there's no way to enter a 
password -- keypresses are not registered), so I tried the Thunderbird 
container instead.

What you get is noVNC in a browser tab, to a container instance just for 
you. You get a checkout of the sources of Thunderbird, plus whatever 
development tools you need to edit, build, and test Thunderbird. Well, I 
assume so -- TB itself has no README, INSTALL or HACKING file, and running 
configure tells me that the mail application is missing. But, in theory, if 
I knew how to work on TB, I could.

So it's really cool, actually: "I want to help with <foo>" translates to 
"start browser and point at foo-on-janitor", and assuming foo is set up 
there, bam, start hacking already.

It is not really clear how one would submit changes afterwards -- I guess 
it would be useful to have a "log in to GH" or "log in to KDE Phab" link on 
the desktop to make that kind of thing clear to drive-by contributors. 
Afterwards, you can just delete the container and it's gone. This could be 
*really* useful for those drive-by contributors, or people asking "how do I 
get started?" There is a risk, in the sense that pushing one container with 
one set of tools and one underlying distro *might* skew the kind of 
contributors we get.

I suppose we should do FreeBSD + Clang + Plasma as a devel container, then 
new contributors will write non-Linuxism, non-GCCism code without noticing 
what's underneath, right? (I kid, I kid .. syscall numbers don't match up).

Right now the service is invite-only, and some of the user-handling is a 
little weird. Once you're in the system, logging in (in the web browser, to 
be able to manage your containers) works like this:
 - enter email address in login page
 - get email, which has a one-time link which logs you in
 - click on link, and use the resulting browser tab for managing

The (web) UI has a couple of quirks, mainly that clicking on things changes 
the cursor to "forbidden" while things happen, which can take quite a 
while. So sometimes it's click, wait, wait, hope that it completed. I 
understand there are multiple improvements to the web-UI in the works.

My plan right now is to play with the KDE docker file until I get a feel 
for what's actually there, and to massage it (or rather, I'll suggest 
changes to R.Catolino, who maintains that particular dockerfile) towards 
some kind of "you want this workflow" setup. I somehow doubt that setting 
up a container for all possible kinds of KDE development is useful (you can 
already sort of see this in Janitor -- it's not like Rust, Firefox and 
Thunderbird are all jammed into one container, either). So in first 
instance, I'll be aiming for an up-to-date (-ish) Plasma desktop with dev 
tools installed ready to work on KMyMoney and Okular (an arbitrary 
selection).

[ade]