kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Thomas Pointhuber <thomas.pointhuber@xxxxxx>]

Hi,

I think this topic will have many different point of views, but I think
it is important to discuss it anyway.

I'm now about 5 years on the project, started as library maintainer and
now sometimes with code contributions as well. I experienced at least a
few different types of how software projects can be design of a
management perspective to get work done.

Currently, there is the time where many big organizations (GNOME and
freedesktop.org for example) moved their development to custom GitLab
instances. And I would like to propose to think about that for KiCad as
well. Not because everyone does it, but because it would benefit the
project itself. There are various reasons I can think of right now:

* patches are sometimes simply forgotten on the mailing list
* it is pretty hard to find old patches on the mailing list unless you
have the e-mails stored on your account. You cannot search on launchpad
* CI integration of patches is missing. People need to run them explicit
before merging, or the automated build will fail at some point
* getting CI runs for various systems requires explicit request due to
missing automatization
* no automated linter checks (would require us to reformat the project)
* it's hard to track changes of patches, especially when modified,
squashed,...
* way better possibilities to view/edit/show history online
* review tools on Launchpad are cumbersome and rarely used. This should
be the standard in point of fact.
  * easier to handle a proper review than with e-mail
* easier to keep track how discussions evolved
* the project is currently split between Launchpad and GitHub, this
would allow us to combine all parts on one platform
* GitLab would theoretically allow us add custom differs for library review
* new contributors likely know GitHub/Gitlab workflow and can join more
easily

I know this is quite some heavy proposal due to change of workflow and
bug-migration. Nevertheless, we should at least discuss it.

PS: A college built a working GitLab CI script with export of build
artifacts. GitLab integration of Jenkins would be possible as well.

Regards,
Thomas

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