Re: Packaging problems

[Willow Liquorice]

Alright, fair point.

Still, more automated testing/packaging isn't a bad thing. What exactly 
does the CI do, right now? I looked in .buildbot in the main repo, and I 
guess it just tries to build and install GNUnet from source on whatever 
OS hosts Buildbot? Couldn't see that much automated testing/packaging.

I'll say again that not having GNUnet running on Debian's CI is a big 
missed opportunity. Being able to deploy and test on Debian Unstable 
automatically would surely make it easier to keep the Debian package up 
to date.

I'm not sure about the exact process, but I get the impression from 
reading about the subject that it could just be a matter of creating a 
new version, which could trigger building Debian packages, which then go 
to Debian Unstable, and are then used with autopkgtest on ci.debian.net.

Best wishes,
        Willow

On 03/06/2022 20:44, Christian Grothoff wrote:
> Having many packages doesn't usually make it easier for packagers, it 
> just means that now they have to deal with even more sources, and create 
> more package specifications. Moreover, build times go up, as you now 
> need to run configure many times. Worse, you then need to find out in 
> which order to build things, and what are dependencies. It basically 
> makes it worse in all aspects.
>
> Another big issue is that right now, I at least notice if I break the 
> build of an application and can fix it. Same if I run analysis tools: 
> they at least get to see the entire codebase, and can warn us if 
> something breaks. If we move those out-of-tree, they'll be even more 
> neglected. What we can (and do do) is mark really badly broken 
> applications as 'experimental' and require --with-experimental to build 
> those. That's IMO better than moving stuff out of tree.
>
> Also, you probably don't want to split things as you proposed: GNS 
> depends on VPN and SETU! SET is supposed to become obsolete, but 
> consensus still needs it until SETU is extended to match the SET 
> capabilities.
>
> Finally, as for build times, have you even tried 'make -j 16' or 
> something like that? Multicore rules ;-).
>
> Happy hacking!
>
> Christian
>
>
> On 6/2/22 17:29, Willow Liquorice wrote:
> > Right. Perhaps the onus is on the developers (i.e. us) to make things 
> > a bit easier, then?
> >
> > To be honest, I barely understand how the GNUnet project is put 
> > together on a source code level, let alone how packaging is done. One 
> > of the things I'm going to do with the Sphinx docs is provide a 
> > high-level overview of how the main repo is structured.
> >
> > On the subject of complexity, I attempted to disentangle that awful 
> > internal dependency graph a while ago, to get a better idea of how 
> > GNUnet works. I noticed that it's possible to divide the subsystems up 
> > into closely-related groups:
> >      * a "backbone" (CADET, DHT, CORE, and friends),
> >      * a VPN suite,
> >      * a GNS suite,
> >      * and a set operations suite (SET, SETI, SETU).
> >
> > A bunch of smaller "application layer" things (psyc+social+secushare, 
> > conversation, fs, secretsharing+consensus+voting) then rest on top of 
> > one or more of those suites.
> >
> > I seem to recall that breaking up the main repo has been discussed 
> > before, and I think it got nowhere because no agreement was reached on 
> > where the breaks should be made. My position is that those 
> > "applications" (which, IIRC, are in various states of "barely 
> > maintained") should be moved to their own repos, and the main repo be 
> > broken up into those four software suites.
> >
> > As Maxime says, GNUnet takes a long time to compile (when it actually 
> > does - I'm having problems with that right now), and presumably quite 
> > a while to test too. The obvious way to reduce those times is to 
> > simply *reduce the amount of code being compiled and tested*. Breaking 
> > up the big repo would achieve that quite nicely.
> >
> > More specifically related to packaging, would it be a good idea to 
> > look into CD (Continuous Delivery) to complement our current CI setup? 
> > It could make things easier on package maintainers. Looks like Debian 
> > has a CI system we might be able to make use of, and all we'd need to 
> > do is point out the test suite in the package that goes to the Debian 
> > archive.