Last week started on Monday with trying to resolve why the DCO bot would not show up as a status check for a GitHub repository. I tried enabling it for the test organization instead of an individual repository and that still wasn’t working. Eventually by searching the error message that appeared in the box I found out through an article for enabling CI that in GitHub you need to manually trigger the process before you can enable it as a status check. This solved the issue and after creating a branch, committing to it, and merging it with master, the DCO bot ran for the first time and then showed up as a status check in the branch restrictions menu. I updated the pull request with a comment about this since it resolved a discussion that had been ongoing with Dr. Jackson. After that, I commented on the workflow diagrams issue to see which sections should have diagrams created for them. I looked over the contributing document and thought that Getting ready to work, Work, and Getting your work reviewed and merged all seemed like they could use some diagrams. Finally, I figured out what I would be doing for the rest of the week and planned questions for the next day’s meeting.
Tuesday started with a research meeting that was quickly joined by Dr. Jackson over the phone. We discussed various things including the ongoing project board issue that needs to get resolved so we could update the documents with which board structure to use and how to set it up. We also talked about changing to a different license for some of the project files. I helped to resolve a Discord issue with server joining messages. Most of what I would be working on for the rest of the week was beginning the migration from GitHub to GitLab as it was at this point a pretty sure thing that we were going with this platform. I would start this by deleting the previously imported repositories and re-import them.
Wednesday I started this GitLab migration and deleted all of the previous repositories in the LibreFoodPantry GitLab group. I then imported all of the projects from GitHub to my account and transferred them to the LFP group. One issue that I discovered when importing the projects was that it didn’t link issues that were created by some users on GitHub that didn’t have a GitLab account and it made me the owner of these un-linked issues. After that, I read over the license that Dr. Jackson suggested we start using. After reading it over, I agree with Dr. Wurst that it seems a little too complicated. After getting a response from Dr. Jackson on which sections to create diagrams for, I started working on this by creating a new feature branch. I started with the Getting ready to work section. I looked at the links he suggested for how commit diagrams were designed and somewhat used some of the styling from these later when I was creating my commit diagrams. As I was creating the diagrams, I was running through the workflow myself to see that it worked properly for me. I ended up adding some git commands into the contributing document that I thought would be helpful. I also created a new issue that I discovered when testing this workflow about how to shops update their master branch when changes are made in LFP’s upstream. I suggested using GitLab’s auto repository mirroring function that takes care of this automatically. I also tested out pushing an empty commit to a new branch and creating a work-in-progress merge request back to the LFP project. I thought it was cool that when you push to a branch after doing this the commits also go to the WIP merge request so others can see your progress. By the end of the day I had created diagrams for Getting ready to work and the work sections.
Thursday was exciting. A decision had finally been reached and we would end up using GitLab and Discord! After seeing this I posted my migration issue and also replied what was the best document to follow for importing repositories. It was decided that shop managers would re-import the projects so that they would be the owners of any issues that didn’t properly link in the import. I then went back to the diagrams and tested out how you update a feature branch from the master branch. I realized that I forgot to add the developer’s computer to the diagrams and went back to the previously created diagrams and added this. I also wanted to figure out where upstream was pointing to and realized that it was the LFP project’s master branch after some searching. I then had to figure out how to set the upstream’s master for a cloned repository of this from the shop fork, this was aided by a past exercise from CS348. I think this command should probably be added to the contributing document since it is not mentioned and not something that happens automatically. I also discovered some other issues that should be touched up on in the contributing document but I wanted to finish the diagrams before migrating to GitLab so my commits would transfer over properly. The hardest part of the diagrams was creating the commit graphs. I figured this out by looking at the commits that were on the different branches through the Web UI and after that I discovered that GitLab has a commit graph for repositories. That helped greatly with creating diagrams for the merge commits part of the workflow. I then finished the Getting your work reviewed and merged diagram and pushed that to the branch.
On Friday there was a bunch of notifications since a lot of new issues were created on GitLab since we started migration to this platform. I started looking at some of the new ones and also replied to Dr. Wurst’s question about why commits on his projects seem to have transferred correctly. I discovered that the issue with linking accounts is more related to issues and not commits and that GitLab seems to make dummy accounts for commits if it can’t link to an actual account. I then enabled the DCO push rule for Dr. Wurst’s imported projects. I then created a pull request for my diagrams before the ProjectTemplate repository was imported to GitLab. I also assigned myself some new issues to work on. Later that night Dr. Jackson discovered when importing the ProjectTemplate repository that issues I created on GitHub weren’t being linked to my GitLab account on. We tried to resolve this in various ways by enabling different options. I tried signing in to GitLab with my GitHub account and set the same email address on both platforms to the same one and made it publicly viewable. Sadly, this did not resolve the issue and we would try to fix it the next day.
Saturday, Dr. Jackson decided that I should import the ProjectTemplate repository myself so that it would automatically link all of my work to my GitLab account. This worked fine except for a couple of merge commits I had done with a private GitHub email address through the Web UI. We decided this was fine and I left it as-is. Finally, I enabled DCO checks for the BEAR-Necessities-Market project and updated the issue with this information.
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.