Xfce infrastructure in 2020
Oh boy, 3 years without any blogpost ! So much things happened in the Xfce world!
First, we finally released Xfce 4.14 in August 2019, more than 4 years of effort, a migration to gtk3, and so much new things, but you already know that, and you surely already run it.
We are now working on Xfce 4.16 , with the hope to release it this year (yes, in 2020) !
You can read more development news on our blog.
Some buzzwords: new icons, CSD, drop of gtk2 support, UI revamp, and tons of other stuff.
I want to talk a bit about the infrastructure.
Last year, we had a Gandi sponsorship for our servers. I started an Ansible repository with all our services (no more -undocumented- local modifications!), and we migrated a big part of our infra to the new servers (docs, www, wiki etc).
Then came the time to think about our development environment. We used the cgit/gitolite/bugzilla triptych, which worked fine for us for more than a decade, but make difficulty to have new contributor (our workflow was…hm, suboptimal).
We tested differents solutions (mainly Gitea and GitLab), and we opted for the famous Gitlab, already used by multiples open source projects. In the core team we were several to use it at work, so we were in a familiar environment.
For months, a gitlab was running on one of our Gandi instance, to do tests and prepare the transition.
But it was so much work that we never started the real migration. Then came the Covid-19 lockdown. No friends, no bars, lot of free time, so why not spent it on Xfce ?
With Simon (ochosi) and Andre (andreldm), we started to use our own gitlab by opening issues, creating todo, doing merge requests etc related to the migration.
The 1st of May, we finally did the migration to GitLab ! Woot !
Jason (j4yav), working for Gitlab inc, joined us and proposed to help us for the Gitlab CI/CD setup. At the same time, we got a new (sponsored !) VM from FossHost ! Perfect timing, we can now run a dedicated gitlab-runner instance, and we started to use gitlab-ci !
As of July 2020, almost all Xfce components (core, apps, panel plugins) run make distcheck on every merge requests and push to master, thanks to our xfce-build docker container.
Now that we have a beautiful GitLab, merge requests and CI, the only missing part was… the migration from Bugzilla !
I forked and modified bztogl, a tool developped and used by Gnome and Freedesktop folks when they migrated away from bugzilla to gitlab in 2018/2019.
Initially, we wanted to migrate all bugzilla issues to gitlab (opened and closed ones). But we had more than 15000 issues ! We decided to only migrate opened issues. We took the opportunity to do a biiig cleanup of old bugs by closing more than 500 of them.
A important condition of the bugzilla migration was to not lose our 15 years of history.
AndreLDM did a huge work by creating bzstatic, a tool to snapshot a bugzilla instance and make it a simple static html version : https://bugzilla.xfce.org.
He open sourced it at https://gitlab.xfce.org/andreldm/bzstatic !
As a result, we now have a modern developments workflow, fully integrated with gitlab. We enabled github and gitlab.com auth on our instance (some people requested it), and since 3 months, we’ve seen a surge of new contributors, issues and merge request ! Really a good news for the Xfce project ! We also had a sponsorship from Scaleway lately, that we need to set up !
So much things left to do, like update all our documentations for the new workflow, work on Xfce 4.16, get rid of our old release manager and use gitlab-ci to generate artifacts, simplify our translation workflow and tons of other things !
Enjoy !