Post-MegaRelease projects

[Ben Cooksley]

On Sat, Feb 24, 2024 at 11:35 PM Konstantin Kharlamov <Hi-Angel at yandex.ru>
wrote:

> On Sat, 2024-02-24 at 23:07 +1300, Ben Cooksley wrote:
>
> On Sat, Feb 24, 2024 at 10:27 PM Konstantin Kharlamov <Hi-Angel at yandex.ru>
> wrote:
>
> On Sat, 2024-02-24 at 22:16 +1300, Ben Cooksley wrote:
>
> On Sat, Feb 24, 2024 at 8:37 PM Konstantin Kharlamov <Hi-Angel at yandex.ru>
> wrote:
>
> On Sat, 2024-02-24 at 16:31 +1300, Ben Cooksley wrote:
>
> On Fri, Feb 23, 2024 at 11:12 PM Sune Vuorela <nospam at vuorela.dk> wrote:
>
> On 2024-02-22, Nate Graham <nate at kde.org> wrote:
> > I've started pondering post-megarelease projects. We've spent so long on
> > porting and bugfixing that I think it might be useful to shift gears to
> > feature work, and I'd like to brainstorm potential large-scale projects
> > and gauge the level of interest in putting resources into them soon.
>
> A bit more from the devops end that I'd love to see people tackle:
>
>  - Ensure frameworks and app unit tests interacting with windows can run
>    on Windows.
>    More details: The following fails on our windows CI
>    https://invent.kde.org/sune/windows-test-thingie/-/blob/master/main.cpp
>    I find it weird that we are spending resources on putting things in
>    the windows store and making apps available on windows, but we can't
>    actually have passing tests in our CI.
>
>
> This unfortunately will not be easy to solve.
>
> One of the key things that we've learned out of doing CI, as has been
> showcased by FreeBSD in particular, is that the builders need to be
> ephemeral - that is only around for the build in question that is being run.
> We're currently accomplishing this by using containers - via Podman (for
> Linux/Android/FreeBSD) and Docker (for Windows).
>
> Containers also offer us the advantage of allowing people to easily
> reproduce the CI environment on their local system without too much trouble.
>
> For Windows however, Microsoft has limited the container stack to not
> allow anything GUI related to work. The underlying libraries may be there,
> but the equivalent display server components are not operational.
>
> To complicate things further, on Windows certain permissions are
> restricted to the interactive console and are not possible to do as either
> a scheduled task or as a system service.
> Usage of existing Windows automation frameworks such as Powershell
> Remoting or SSH will therefore not work if we want things to perfectly
> replicate a end user environment - because those will run the command(s) as
> part of a non-interactive session (even if the user we connect as is the
> same one logged in on the desktop console).
>
>
> Idk if it's a silly question, but… If Windows native containers have so
> many restrictions, why not just use Linux containers with WINE inside?
>
>
> Because Wine is not Windows either, and there could be subtle differences
> in how things run / interact with the system.
>
>
> Fair point, no sw is bugless. Although, from my shallow experience WINE
> seems to have an excellent test suite. I remember reporting a regression
> once, which turned out to be due to some obscure surfaces manipulation by
> an old Heroes Ⅲ game. WINE devs not only quickly fixed that, but they also
> added tests for that case, so I'd presume such regression is just not gonna
> happen anymore.
>
> Plus some of our software would like to test certain system level
> infrastructure (like say KDE Connect).
>
>
> Out of curiosity, what does this infrastructure include? I thought KDE
> connect only uses network sockets and system tray.
>
>
> No idea, I saw their commentary on debugging issues they were having in
> their unit tests in #kde-devel.
> Those issues were due to a lack of permissions, specifically around the
> interactive console - that is how I know some of our tests need those
> additional permissions and why running as a scheduled task / system service
> will not be sufficient for "fully working" CI tests on Windows.
>
>
> Sorry, it seems there's some misunderstanding… Judging by what you say you
> seem to be referring to the restrictions that Windows containers have on
> Windows. But that was the point that started this thread, to which I
> replied that running Linux containers with WINE might be a solution 😊
>

What i'm referring to here is that KDE Connect interacts with various
components of the system in order to do what it does.
See for instance the ability to share Notifications between devices, or
ability to act as a presenter device.

That requires accessing various system level APIs which WINE very well may
not support - and we wouldn't support a scenario of using it under WINE
because there is a native Linux version already.


>
> Plus, we have to have native Windows to compile things anyway as we need
> to use MSVC (otherwise you have no Qt Web Engine support, as that cannot be
> built with MingW)
>
>
> But I presume it can be built with Clang? In particular, Google Chrome on
> Windows is being built with Clang — and Web Engine is basically a fork of
> Chromium.
>
>
> Qt 6 as a whole does not list Clang as a supported compiler - see
> https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/supported-platforms.html
>
> Given Windows is a bit strange in the first place, i'd be quite reluctant
> to step outside of what they list as supported.
>
>
> Oh, that's interesting. So Qt claims to support MinGW, but then WebEngine
> does not actually build with it? So it's a bug on their side, was it
> reported?
>
> While at it, just to make sure I understand: do you compile with MSVC
> everything or just the WebEngine (which Idk if it's possible without the
> deps, but I guess asking doesn't hurt).
>

As you will see on the supported platforms page, certain modules don't
support certain platform/compiler combinations - and MingW / WebEngine is
one of those unsupported combinations.

MSVC and MingW have incompatible C++ compiler ABIs. That means it is an all
or nothing approach, so yes everything is built using MSVC and cannot be
built with another compiler.

Cheers,
Ben
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