On 2024-02-22, Nate Graham <
nate@kde.org> wrote:
> I've started pondering post-megarelease projects. We've spent so long on
> porting and bugfixing that I think it might be useful to shift gears to
> feature work, and I'd like to brainstorm potential large-scale projects
> and gauge the level of interest in putting resources into them soon.
A bit more from the devops end that I'd love to see people tackle:
- Ensure frameworks and app unit tests interacting with windows can run
on Windows.
More details: The following fails on our windows CI
https://invent.kde.org/sune/windows-test-thingie/-/blob/master/main.cpp I find it weird that we are spending resources on putting things in
the windows store and making apps available on windows, but we can't
actually have passing tests in our CI.
This unfortunately will not be easy to solve.
One of the key things that we've learned out of doing CI, as has been showcased by FreeBSD in particular, is that the builders need to be ephemeral - that is only around for the build in question that is being run.
We're currently accomplishing this by using containers - via Podman (for Linux/Android/FreeBSD) and Docker (for Windows).
Containers also offer us the advantage of allowing people to easily reproduce the CI environment on their local system without too much trouble.
For Windows however, Microsoft has limited the container stack to not allow anything GUI related to work. The underlying libraries may be there, but the equivalent display server components are not operational.
To complicate things further, on Windows certain permissions are restricted to the interactive console and are not possible to do as either a scheduled task or as a system service.
Usage of existing Windows automation frameworks such as Powershell Remoting or SSH will therefore not work if we want things to perfectly replicate a end user environment - because those will run the command(s) as part of a non-interactive session (even if the user we connect as is the same one logged in on the desktop console).