Month: December 2011

Gitorious Merge Request Monitor

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In Maliit, all changes have to be reviewed by two people in order to be merged to mainline. This helps us catch issues early and keep code quality high. Since the code is hosted on Gitorious, we use their merge requests feature for that purpose. Up until now we have periodically checked the website for changes (potentially going through each and every one of the repositories), and manually mentioned updates in the IRC channel. This is both tedious and inefficient, so I wrote a simple tool to help the issue: Gitorious Merge Request Monitor

It provides an IRC Bot which gives status updates on merge requests in an IRC channel:

16:01 < mrqbot-AfFa1> desertconsulting requested merge of ~desertconsulting/maliit/desertconsultings-maliit-framework with maliit-framework in http://gitorious.org/maliit/maliit-framework/merge_requests/126
16:01 < mrqbot-AfFa1> mikhas updated http://gitorious.org/maliit/maliit-framework/merge_requests/125  State changed from Go ahead and merge to Merged

One can also query the current status from it:

15:02 < jonnor> mrqbot-7ACeB: list
15:02 < mrqbot-7ACeB> maliit-framework/127: - New - Allow QML plugins to add custom import paths for QML files and QML modules
15:02 < mrqbot-7ACeB> maliit-framework/126: - Need info - configurable importPath for qml
15:02 < mrqbot-7ACeB> maliit-plugins/26: - New - Add PluginClose from main view and add key repetition support
15:02 < mrqbot-7ACeB> maliit-plugins/25: - New - Clear active keys and magnifier on keyboard change
15:02 < mrqbot-7ACeB> maliit-plugins/24: - New - Remove QtGui dependency from libmaliit-keyboard
15:02 < mrqbot-7ACeB> maliit-plugins/23: - New - Get rid of Qt keywords
15:02 < mrqbot-7ACeB> maliit-plugins/22: - New - Add phone number and number layout getters.

Status changes are retrieved by periodically checking the Gitorious project activity feed (Atom)*, and the status itself is scraped from the website. There is no other API right now, unfortunately. Implemented in Python with Twisted, feedparser and BeautifulSoup doing all of the heavy lifting.

Get it from PyPi, using easy_install or pip:
pip install gitorious-mrq-monitor
gitorious-mrq-monitor --help # For usage information

For now this solves the immediate need for the development work-flow we have in the Maliit project. Several ideas for extending the tool are mentioned in the TODO. Contributions welcomed!

The Maliit buildbot

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After having set up the typical things open source projects needs like a website/wiki, mailing-list and bug-tracker, Maliit now also has something not so common: a build-bot.

As Maliit consists of several components that can be built in several different ways (and for several different platforms), we wanted to automate the build and tests of the different variations to ensure that we do not break any of them. This is especially important for variations which are not easy to test for the individual developers, like for instance Maliit on Qt 5.

The software chosen to help with this task was Buildbot. Getting an initial instance it up and running was very quick and pain-free, especially thanks to packages being easily available and the excellent documentation. The current setup now builds, tests and installs the two major components we have: Maliit Framework and Maliit (Reference) Plugins, in the most important build/config variations we have. A total of 12 individual build jobs, plus 2 meta-builds. The configuration for the instance can be found in the maliit-buildbot-configuration repository.

For security reasons the build-bot is not directly exposed to the Internet. Instead a script runs every 5 minutes to generate a static HTML website and publish on the public web-server: Maliit build-bot

Buildbot says: All green!

This gives us a minimal continuous integration system for Maliit, which for now will hopefully helps us avoid breakage. In the future, the usage of the build-bot might extend to include:

  • Automating the release process
  • Testing of merge-requests/patches before merging to master
  • Automated integration/system testing, complementing the unit-tests
  • Triggering external builders for packaging. OpenSUSE OBS, Maemo 5 Garage, etc.
  • Automating certain aspects of bug-lifetime. Resolving when fix is committed, closing on release if pre-verified, etc