Last week started on Monday with getting back on track with this project. I looked at some of the issue updates on GitHub including the issue about switching to Discord. I then emailed Dr. Wurst asking about how the DCO sign-off works for committing to the project, hoping that I could push my setup documents and diagrams before the next day’s LFP committee meeting. To my surprise, the GitLab Gold issue had been fixed and the WSU account now has access to all of the Gold features again. I was really happy about this since it means I could go back to testing the advanced features offered with this package. Sadly, the GitHub issue still remains but as of Monday they hadn’t deleted my testing accounts yet. After that, I looked at the Probot question one last time and created my reply to Dr. Jackson about this. Finally, I looked at Dr. Wurst’s earlier question about free server time for open source projects. I couldn’t seem to find much information directly about if this was available, at least with Amazon Web Services or Google.
Tuesday started with a research meeting with Dr. Wurst. We covered a lot in this meeting, but the biggest thing was separating out the old issue card and breaking it into multiple new issues, as the old one was starting to get too big and congested. Dr. Wurst then closed the old issue for good. The new issues included:
By doing this it makes it easier to choose one task and finish it and see the whole progress as it moves across the project board on GitHub.
After the meeting, I read the contributing document to see how I am supposed to be making additions to this project before committing and pushing to the repository. I then updated my local repository for the shop setup documents and re-exported all of the graph files. I then looked at the first pull request for this project and approved it and merged it into the master branch. Dr. Jackson decided that we should start using our own workflow when making additions to the LFP projects now, so I created a new branch for my setup documents, signed the previous commits with the DCO and then push the changes to GitHub. I then created a pull request and requested it to be reviewed by Dr. Jackson.
Wednesday started with reading issue updates. I then looked to see if there was a way to always sign commits without having to add the -s parameter each time. I couldn’t find what I wanted to for this. I then started working on revising the documentation according to Dr. Jackson’s review comments. I pushed my changes to the branch. Finally, I started looking at what to do for creating workflow documentation. I discovered that Dr. Jackson had already wrote a lot that covered this already and asked on this issue card what more I can add to it.
Thursday, I found out that the links in the setup documentation for the diagrams had broken when merged into the master branch. I fixed these image links for the setup diagrams by making them relative as Dr. Jackson suggested. I then started figuring out the answer to Dr. Jackson’s question about how labels work on GitLab issues and issue boards. With this I figured out how the different labels work in GitLab. This included group labels that allow a group level issue board to control issues with projects underneath the group. In response to the original question about how the two boards had a “doing” column I finally came to the conclusion that the original hand-off situation Dr. Jackson was asking about must have had two different column names such as “Team1 doing” and “Team2 doing” as if both boards had the same column name, moving an issue on one board automatically moves it on the other. I then updated the issue card with my response.
Friday, I updated the platform comparison feature sheet with some of the things I’ve discovered since using the platform and closed Dr. Jackson’s comment about WIP merge requests. I then posted the link to this Google Sheet on the issue card on the community board about GitHub vs. GitLab. I then reviewed and approved some pull requests for Dr. Jackson. I then started looking at the documenting continuous integration issue and looked at how to enable CI for a GitHub project specifically using Travis as it seems to be the most popular CI marketplace app on GitHub. I actually found this really easy to do, only needing to set the language in the config file to Java for an example project I had. Finally, I reviewed another pull request for Dr. Jackson and added some suggested edits before approving, especially fixing broken document links.
Saturday, I approved and merged some more pull requests and continued looking at how to get the DCO bot to work on a GitHub repository in order to double check the instructions Dr. Jackson posted for how to do this in our documentation.
Sunday, I looked at if GitLab has its own version of a DCO bot. I found through different pages that using GitLab’s Push Rules for commits you can create a rule that enforces all commits to be signed according to a regular expression. I then had to figure out the correct regular expression that checks that all commits have a line matching the form:
Signed-off-by: ‘firstName lastName’ <username@domain>
After reading through a couple of tutorial websites and finding this great one that lets you test in real-time your expression against a string I finally figured out the correct expression to be:
Signed-off-by: \w+ \w+ <.+@.+\..+>
I then tested this on the GitLab web UI to make sure it works, and it did. I then tested it with locally with GitBash and also with branches. I found it works a little differently than the DCO bot on GitHub and blocks all commits from being pushed unless they have the included signature. I actually like this as it prevents the commits from even getting pushed to a project without including the sign-off. The downside is that this sign-off is needed on merge commits too. I then updated the DCO documentation to include instructions for enabling this on GitLab and added some comments on the pull request about this. Finally, I created the high-level continuous integration document, added a definition for it and an overview of how to enable it on GitHub and GitLab. I pushed this and created a pull request for this.
In retrospective after this week, I found that I enjoyed the workflow we are using with selecting an issue to work on, creating a branch, pushing the work, then asking for it to be reviewed by someone else before merging. I especially like the reviewing part as you can always have a second opinion before posting the work you have done to the master branch.
From the blog CS@Worcester – Chris' Computer Science Blog by cradkowski and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.