Dirty works to be done

18 Dec 2019 - MP

Second iteration of CuteHMI project is becoming decent, but we need to sort out some mundane things.

First thing to focus on is a Git workflow. Normally we are not using merge requests (except of external contributions), because for small teams it seems to be more efficient and flexible to work directly on master branch. This has a disadvantage that code may become broken from time to time, leaving people who clone repository with broken software. To address this issue we need to establish stable version of master branch, which would be frequently merged against master if CI/CD pipelines succeed. Thus master branch would act as some sort of auto merge-request. Conceptually this would look like on the following diagram.

Some effort is required to implement this behaviour correctly however. I’ve been looking for various resources on how to do it. GitBot was quite promising approach, but an idea to give private keys to GitLab in multi-user environment had to be abandoned, because of security concerns. Therefore my current idea is to write some custom scripts, which would rely on GitLab REST API.

Another thing to face is documentation. I realize parts, which are missing are rather extensive and I promised few months ago to improve it. This covers providing “Getting Started” section, explaining examples, providing API docs with code snippets. I would want to test all the examples and code snippets, which land in Doxygen, so this will require some work. There is also technical issue, which is that documentation for each branch/tag should be kept in separate subdirectory denoting branch/tag it has been built from.

Last thing to do is to perform some name refactoring. This involves changing few class names. I would also like tool names to be consistent with extensions naming scheme, but I yet need to test it and see if there are any serious drawbacks. These would be last name refactoring in current iteration, so after that APIs could be considered stable and whole project should be hopefully marked as stable for the first time.