Qt, Open Source and corona

[Ben Cooksley]

On Thu, Apr 9, 2020 at 9:02 PM Boudewijn Rempt <boud at valdyas.org> wrote:
>
> On woensdag 8 april 2020 23:20:34 CEST Jens wrote:
>
> >
> > Is there any vague calculations concerning the work that would be needed being
> > done?
> >
>
> * There needs to be a mailing list or two
> * There needs to be a system like gerrit or gitlab to host development
> * There needs to be CI -- the Qt project has its own thing for that, COIN.
> * There needs to be a website
> * There needs to be a committee or a way of making decisions: what to keep, what to drop, how to handle relations with the Qt company, how to release, whether Qt6 still makes sense, or whether Qt5 should be developed for the next decade...
>
> From what I see, gerrit and coin are using serious amounts of sysadmin time, and that needs money. Creating a decision-making process is going to be the hardest thing. I'm guessing that hosting another couple of mailing lists and having Qt on KDE's download mirror network isn't going to be a problem. We already mirror Qt's git repos.
>
> (Of course, I might have forgotten some things...)
>

I can confirm that the cost of hosting additional mailing lists would
be insignificant (as long as the new lists follow KDE policies
surrounding how email is handled).

The same also applies for hosting source code tarballs and binaries on
our mirror networks.

I suspect you could probably adjust Craft relatively easily enough to
produce installers for binary distribution of Qt should someone be
inclined to do so, at which point you can leverage our existing Binary
Factory without too much issue (we plan to add capacity to this anyway
as part of the move to Gitlab and KDE switching from Jenkins to Gitlab
CI)

Hosting of the website also wouldn't be an issue (and if it ends up
being high traffic, as long as the content is cacheable we can rely on
Cloudflare). People would need to step up to write the content and
produce any necessary graphics though :)

The same can be said for Git repositories, as long as they use our
Gitlab instance to do it (as hosting additional repositories on it
represents practically no additional cost aside from the resources
utilised by them, and storage is cheap these days)

Gerrit on the other hand is a completely different matter - it doesn't
even know how to send email properly...

CI for Qt sounds like Pandora's box though, and a complete nightmare -
that is the hard one in that list (whether you would want to use their
system is another matter, given the number of severe regressions it
hasn't caught in the past few releases)

> --
> https://www.krita.org
>
>

Cheers,
Ben