Coala and GNOME

[Alexandre Franke <afranke gnome org>]

On Tue, Feb 10, 2015 at 2:11 PM, Lasse Schuirmann
<lasse schuirmann gmail com> wrote:
> Hi everyone,

Hi Lasse,

CCing some relevant third parties. You can remove soc-admins from
further replies to this thread.

> I don't know if you read my blog post on PGO about coala [2], a static
> code analysis framework. On long term I hope that coala can improve
> code quality for gnome while making some things more convenient and
> newcomer-friendlier. (Without much extra work. Its designed with some
> GNOME principles in mind - intuitivity, simplicity and sane defaults.)
> The projet is hosted at [3]. I have two questions about this:
>
> 1. Do you know if it is possible to get coala into GNOME? That does
> not necessarily mean hosted in the GNOME infrastructure. The GNOME
> infrastructure is sadly not compatible with our QA
> requirements. We check each patch automatically for test coverage,
> failing tests and so on before it gets on master. A process with
> bugzilla and github-mirroring might work eventually and would allow
> coala to be translated by the GNOME translators. (coala already is
> translatable.)

The inclusion of Coala in GNOME is a complex topic. First of all, the
release team tried to change the process from module inclusion to
feature inclusion, but they're not really happy with the current state
of this. We have some cases of technology that originate from GNOME
but are now widely used outside of it while remaining GNOME projects.
libxml is the example that comes to mind. I'll let the release team
give you a more precise answer on this topic.

As for l10n, while we usually consider that only GNOME projects
(defined by "hosted on git.gnome.org") belong on Damned lies, we do
have a section for external dependencies (all coming from freedesktop
it seems) but those modules all seem to rely on various external
platforms (and teams) for their translations. I'm not sure how
feasible it is, but I think it would be complicated to us Damned lies
and the GNOME translation teams for something hosted elsewhere. One of
the difficulties I see is that now we use Damned lies to commit
translations directly to git.gnome.org. Again, I'm letting someone
from the gnome-i18n give you a more precise answer.

> 2. Would it be possible to get a SoC student under
> the GNOME umbrella for this project although it is, at least
> currently, not (yet) a GNOME application? As creator and maintainer
> maintainer of this project I would be willing to mentor and can
> provide a backup contact as well as ideas
> and any other needed information.

I'd say it depends on the exact content of the project, but if it's
about improving code quality in GNOME I could certainly see it being
accepted. Ensure the proposal is GNOME oriented. For instance, a
proposal to "work on memory leak detection in gcc", while useful to
GNOME, would rather belong to GCC.

> Greetings,
>
> Lasse Schuirmann
>
> Links:
> [0] https://wiki.gnome.org/Outreach/SummerOfCode
> [1] https://wiki.gnome.org/Outreach/SummerOfCode/2015/Ideas
> [2] http://wordpress.schuirmann.eu/2014/12/misc/
> [3] https://github.com/coala-analyzer/coala

-- 
Alexandre Franke
GNOME Hacker