[M3devel] Some M3 maintenance questions

[Olaf Wagner]

On Fri, 27 Feb 2015 12:55:26 -0600
"Rodney M. Bates" <rodney_bates at lcwb.coop> wrote:

> I have quite a list of little (and some not so little) maintenance things to
> do to the Modula-3 distribution.  I am learning to use git and github, but
> some involve other things than just the repository.

I'm just in the last stages of migrating one of our customer projects
from Bazaar to Git, including a full-featured automated testing and
deployment system. We've already invested more than 400 hours for
that. Automation of building, testing and deploying software needs
a lot of maintenance and work, which nobody has done yet for the
M3 Github transition. I put a plan of things that would need to be
done into the old Trac Wiki, but I doubt that more than 10% of them
have been achieved.

> 1) Olaf, are you intending to continue hosting the web pages?

Elego can do still do that if no one else volunteers. I cannot
guarantee more that a couple of minutes administration time per
week though. We're rather short of ressources currently.

> 2) How can I update these?  There appear to be copies of some/many of them
>     in the cm3 repository, but these are not served from there as web pages,
>     AFAIK,

There used to be packages names www and doc, and some ship scripts,
which were used to transfer the contents to our web server. I assume
they're still in the Github repo in the same form, so you could use
them. You only need ssh access for birch.elegosoft.com, if Mike
hasn't moved that to another VM. I just tried and can login there.
There is an account
rodney:x:6011:6011:Rodney M. Bates:/home/rodney:/bin/bash

You have quite a few keys installed there:

% sudo ls /home/rodney/.ssh/
allegheny.id_dsa.pub  authorized_keys.1  authorized_keys.3   corliss.id_dsa.pub  known_hosts           selkirk.id_dsa.pub
authorized_keys       authorized_keys2   authorized_keys.3~  garratt.id_dsa.pub  rbates.id_dsa.pub     yellowstone.id_dsa.pub
authorized_keys.0     authorized_keys.2  authorized_keys.4   id_dsa.pub          runnymede.id_dsa.pub

If you still have one of them, you have ssh access. If not, Mike
(manderson at elegosoft.com) will store another for you.

The shipping scripts can (could?) be found in the packages:

./work/cm3-ws/birch.elegosoft.com-2012-04-11-01-34-27/cm3/www/ship-cm3-www
./work/cm3-ws/birch.elegosoft.com-2012-04-11-01-34-27/cm3/doc/ship-cm3-www-doc

The machine still is in use:

elegos-MacBook-Pro:tools.git wagner$ host www.opencm3.net
www.opencm3.net is an alias for birch.elego.de.
birch.elego.de has address 46.4.219.187

(elego.de and elegosoft.com are mostly equivalent)
 
> 3) I have never understood the automated build system on various platforms.
>     What is its status?  Can run these builds manually, or will they run
>     automatically if I put source updates in the right place?  What targets
>     do we have?  (I have LINUXLIBC6 and AMD64_LINUX myself.)

I'm afraid that the Hudson installation on our server is out of order
for quiet a long time. I don't know of any adaptation even for the
source checkout from Github.

I think some other public server should be used now for builds and
tests. The old scripts could be adapted, but most people prefer to
do these things in their own way. I used shell in 2010, but many
scripts have been rewritten in python after that.

> 4) I have also never understood how to run all the many test cases that are
>     in the repository.  Has it been done at all recently?  Are there scripts
>     to do it?  Can I add cases to them?  Are there various targets I can get
>     them to run on?

I haven't done that recently, and I don't really know if anybody
else has.
I would really like to do it and set up a working CI system for
M3 again -- I still think this is the best programming language
for large systems I have encountered so far -- but nobody has ever
paid Elego one Euro for any M3 work, so it's just not business-
compatible ;-) I've got to care for my company, especially since
we've had some hard times during the last two years.

I think the shell and python scripts could be adapted to set up
a working automated build and test system with some weeks of
effort. It's nothing that can be done by changing a few lines
I'm afraid.

I just tried to access the Hudson CI system, and it's still
working, though nothing has been running there for some time.
You'll find it at http://hudson.modula3.com:8080. Some
build servers seem to be still online: master (Linux), 
luthien (FreeBSD 8), and the Solaris buildfarm (opencsw).
The last successful builds seem to be 1 year and 4 months ago,
for example
http://hudson.modula3.com:8080/job/cm3-current-test-all-pkgs-AMD64_LINUX/

You could transfer these jobs to another Hudson or Jenkins system
(the config.xml files should suffice for that), adapt the source
checkout to the Github repository and try to get some builds
running. If you really plan to do that, I offer to help with
all the advice and knowledge I have by answering your questions.

I hope this hasn't been too discouraging,

Olaf
-- 
Olaf Wagner -- elego Software Solutions GmbH -- http://www.elegosoft.com 
               Gustav-Meyer-Allee 25 / Gebäude 12, 13355 Berlin, Germany
phone: +49 30 23 45 86 96  mobile: +49 177 2345 869  fax: +49 30 23 45 86 95
Geschäftsführer: Olaf Wagner | Sitz: Berlin
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