[Gimp-developer] Jenkins infrastructure (Was: Jenkins tutorial)

[scl <scl gplus gmail com>]

On  23.2.2014 at 12:47 AM Sam Gleske wrote:
> Also, something you might be interested in is front end web testing
> for bad
> links, etc.  Recently I've been working on a project to facilitate
> that testing.
>
> https://github.com/sag47/frontend_qa
>
> This can easily be used in a Jenkins job to arbitrarily launch and crawl
> gimp.org and test all the links in it checking for dead links, etc.
> Currently it's a work in progress but it's a place that one can easily
> start for frontend testing the Gimp website.

Thank you for your offer.
I have such a topic on my todo list and have planned to
add it after improving the nightly and continuous builds.
Jenkins opens such a bunch of new opportunities for our release process
and I think I'll speak about it at our LGM BOF meeting.

But if you have sth. stable for production use and are willing to
contribute it in form of a Jenkins job, I'll be glad to integrate it.
I think our both wikis (wiki.gimp.org, gui.gimp.org) would benefit
from such a test, too.
Schumaml, Prokoudine etc.: what are your thoughts or requirements
about it?

On  23.2.2014 at 12:51 AM Sam Gleske wrote:
> That being said... would it be useful to have a vagrant instance of
> the development environment including Jenkins for Job testing?
> With a vagrant file it can be as easy as a single program executing
> to pull down virtual box, the image, all of the requirements for gimp
> building and testing.
> This is something which could also be tweaked.

Indeed, that idea has its charm ;-) I'm currently considering to
improve the Jenkins infrastructure to support multiple build slaves of
various operating systems and other improvements. So the idea of
Vagrant and other Devops tools like Puppy or Chef comes to just the
right time. Let's see how we can make the best of it.
What does GNOME use - Puppy or Chef?
Cameron, do you see a possibility to easily start and setup Virtualbox
VMs for Jenkins master and build slaves with tools like Vagrant, Chef
or Puppy in the Flamingtext infrastructure, that also comes to terms
Flamingtext's interests?

Also the idea of a standardised development environment for GIMP to
get new contributors started quickly has been something I had in mind
for long (see below).

> Also, Jenkins really isn't
> hard.  It's pretty intuitive IMO (java -jar jenkins.jar and you have a
> local web server) but a turn key dev environment would certainly
> lower the barrier to entry.

From the experiences I've made since I took over Jenkins administration
in the GIMP project this is surely true for the first step of installing
Jenkins. The hard work starts when one tries to setup a complex
environment for many, interdependent build products or platforms
and to integrate it into a bigger infrastructure. Also building GIMP
for the first times and/or on other platforms than plain Debian Testing
is a hurdle most times, even for new contributors. This is also an
argument for a dedicated GIMP developer VM.


Kind regards,

Sven