Hi all, As ade mentioned, this directly relates to the onboarding goal and it's indeed something we can improve. I started an issue on Phabricator to make sure this topic is properly tracked: https://phabricator.kde.org/T8484
Can we continue the discussion there? Cheers, Neofytos On Mon, Mar 19, 2018 at 3:33 PM, Adriaan de Groot <gr...@kde.org> wrote: > 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] >