Moving Mir to GitHub

Mir
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Hi all,

We’ve been planning our move to git (and GitHub) for a while now, to simplify contributions from the outside. With the 0.28.1 release out the door, this is now happening under the MirServer GitHub project.

Code

All the code is more or less there (if you contributed to lp:mir but don’t show up here, make sure the email address you used to commit is registered on GitHub). There will likely be some additional syncs to do, but we’ll not accept any more merges on Launchpad.

If you have a merge proposal or branch on Launchpad that you’d like migrated, please reply to this topic, as I have all the branches imported, would just need to push to GitHub.

Bugs

We’ll not migrate bugs from Launchpad, but we’ll close the project bug tracker, please file any new issues in GitHub.

Continuous Integration

As part of this move we also wanted to rework our CI story, which so far was told by our trusted mir-jenkins. The current direction is travis-ci.org with the help of spread.

We want quick-turnaround for pull requests, so when you submit one you don’t have to wait an hour just to find out it didn’t build, or a unit test failed - that’s what we’ll use Travis for. It will build the code and run tests for a set of supported Ubuntu releases and architectures. This is now live, for now we’re looking at ~1h test time, but this is on a single node and we have ideas how to speed things up still (ccache, prepopulating dependencies etc.). We should be able to get as low as 10m.

Longer term, for a more complete set of automatic tests we’ll definitely build Ubuntu packages for the full spectrum of supported releases/architectures. From there we’ll build snaps to run mir-kiosk and friends and run integration/functional tests on supported hardware. We’re in the process of defining our requirements and plans there, we’ll keep you posted.

Enjoy the ride.

5 Likes
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I guess that’s me :wink:

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I’m genuinely interested in knowing how the team sees Mir finding a niche, given Canonical’s movement toward Wayland and GNOME.

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I don’t think it they need to find a niche, they have a huge IoT market where Mir is pretty much the best option. Also it would be more convenient to have it on desktop rather than mutter.

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I know GitHub is popular, but it’s becoming a monopoly. The for-profit company that runs it is not beyond reproach.

It is possible to contribute to Mir without engaging with GitHub, Inc.? Are individual Mir contributors able to take a principled stand against GitHub, Inc. (should they wish to, for whatever reason), or is it an either-or decision?

My point isn’t that “GitHub is evil”; it’s that we should each be able to decide for ourself whether we want to play with that particular company. The same goes for Microsoft with Windows. Until we have that choice, we don’t have freedom from that company’s whims.

I understand why you’ve chosen GitHub (“you” as in the Mir team), but Ubuntu’s founding goal was to disrupt a monopoly, and I think we can do better than fostering another monopoly.

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Feel free to use git-send-email, Git was built with this in mind.

We’ve made a choice to exist on GitHub to ease contributions, but we’re not requiring people to use it.

3 Likes