Fwd: Re: MediaGoblin community meeting this weekend - 4pm Sat Feb 15 UTC-5

[Ben Sturmfels]

Michael Lynch unfortunately won't be able to attend the meeting, but
sent through some comments for consideration (below) about his
unsatisfactory experience with the issue tracker lack of CI and
challenges with loose dependency specifications. I'll add these to the
agenda.

On Sat, 15 Feb 2020, Michael Lynch wrote:

> I’d like to submit some comments via email, so hopefully they’re useful for 
> your
> to consider during the meeting.
>
> The biggest barrier to me in contributing to MediaGoblin was that
> Savannah/Trac feels painfully outdated compared to Github/Gitlab/Bitbucket. I
> primarily work on Github, but I’ve contributed to projects on Gitlab and
> Bitbucket and found it an intuitive transition from Github. With Trac, I felt 
> like I
> was going back to tools that I used 15 years ago, and it was a real struggle 
> to
> learn how to to do something simple like search the bug tracker or contribute 
> a
> patch.
>
> I had a lot of trouble even setting up an account on the bug tracker and then
> once I filed a bug, I couldn’t tell what the status is. IIRC, it was months 
> before I
> received a response. It was also fairly discouraging to see a backlog of bugs
> 300+ issues long dating back to 2011.
>
> The other issue that was hard for me was the lack of a CI configuration. With
> most projects, if I’m having trouble getting it up and running, I can check 
> their
> CI to see how they’re building the project in a clean environment. I spent
> dozens of hours fiddling with dachary’s 4-year-old Docker configuration to get
> it working on the 2019 codebase. And then I basically had to throw away all
> that effort when MediaGoblin changed to stay ahead of the Python 2 EOL. I
> think you ended up replicating a lot of that effort when you updated the
> Dockerfiles. If there were a CI configuration so that nothing was merged into
> master until there was a successful build in CI, there wouldn’t be this
> duplication of effort or the struggle to figure out how to build MediaGoblin
> clean.
>
> One of the things I often ran into when trying to build MediaGoblin is that 
> the
> pip packages would change out from under me and the process that built
> MediaGoblin successfully break a month later because the requirement is for,
> e.g., Sphinx >= 1.2.3, but then Sphinx 1.3.5 introduces a change that breaks
> MediaGoblin and now the build is broken. It would be great to see
> MediaGoblin switch to something like pipenv where it can specify exact
> versions of pip packages that yield a successful build.
>
> Thanks for your work on MediaGoblin! I hope the meeting is productive.

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