[Development] Qt modules, API changes and Qt 6

Frederik Gladhorn Frederik.Gladhorn at qt.io
Fri Feb 15 10:30:19 CET 2019


Hi,

On fredag 15. februar 2019 07:31:33 CET Lars Knoll wrote:
> Summing up the discussion here. It looks like people overall agree that the
> pinned dependency approach (option 3) sounds better than what we currently
> have. The main concern was CI capacity, but Frederik believes that with
> enough storage capacity for build artefacts this will not be worse than
> what we have today with all the failed qt5.git integrations.
 
> The only other option that was seriously considered was a more monolithic
> repo (option 4). Disadvantages here are that it would require more work on
> the CI front to make testing times bearable, and it doesn’t give us a very
> flexible approach with regards to adding/removing modules. This is
> something that option 3 will nicely give us, as it treats all repositories
> the same way. Option 3 does btw not exclude that we later on merge some
> repositories if we feel that makes sense.
 
> So let’s go with option 3. Frederik will be leading the work to get this
> implemented. 
 
> As far as I can see, it requires some changes to CI so that we have the
> dependencies encoded in each repository, a bot to automatically push sha1’s
> of dependencies forward and some monitoring to alert us if modules get left
> behind.


I have indeed been playing with this, and I think I have an implementation
that works when it comes to resolving dependencies based on the idea.

After some pondering and starting with ini files, I settled on yaml, since we 
probably want to extend the data later on and I would like this to be easily 
human and machine read- and writable.

My current files look like this:
 dependencies:
     qt/qtbase:
         ref: 698078680fc5a6870177af285fa50c0d8a7c0bc3
         url: code.qt.io
     qt/qtsvg:
         ref: 2ae3c52fc061f574c9582bf58963fb3996724fbf
         url: code.qt.io


This is for qt/qtdeclarative, sha1's taken from qt5.git at some point.
Then there is the question of what the file name should be. Should it be at 
the top-level or in a coin subdirectory? dependencies.yaml?


I have not yet worked on the bot doing the module updates (which may turn out 
to be the harder part).
I don't think this can go live before we have that written as well.

Cheers,
Frederik

 
> Cheers,
> Lars
> 
> 
> > On 30 Jan 2019, at 11:11, Edward Welbourne <edward.welbourne at qt.io>
> > wrote:
> > 
> > Robin Burchell (30 January 2019 10:13)
> > 
> >> I will admit that a monorepo has a _different_ set of problems
> >> (including but not limited to: longer build times, longer test times,
> >> flaky tests in unrelated areas blocking changes),
> > 
> > 
> > It also makes it easier to cope with API changes, which is great where
> > it's public APIs that haven't yet been shipped, but also makes it easier
> > to get away with using private APIs between components that really
> > shouldn't do that.  One of the classic reasons for modularisation at the
> > VC layer is that it makes this sort of thing harder, which means it
> > happens less, which is good.
> > 
> > There's also the problem of scope - which things go in the monorepo,
> > which should be outside.  We have that today, with qt5/, and we should
> > probably hoist some of its pieces outside, if only to force ourselves to
> > make it easy for a sizeable component to live happily outside; that
> > would enable folk in our ecosystem to live happily alongside, rather
> > than inside, Qt.  If we insist on solving that as part of a switch to a
> > monorepo, then we win (even if we could have done it without the
> > switch), if only because a major upheaval is an opportunity to make
> > other needed changes.  But if we move to a monorepo without solving that
> > problem, there's a significant risk we'll be making things harder for
> > those who work outside but close to Qt.
> > 
> > 
> >> but those problems are not complex, and can be fixed with some
> >> dedicated application of smarter scripting at build/test time
> > 
> > 
> > I remain to be convinced.
> > 
> > 
> >> (for instance: if change is doc only, don't run any test that _isn't_
> >> related to documentation, to cover one complaint from earlier in this
> >> thread).
> > 
> > 
> > This sort of thing [*] sounds terribly sensible and feasible, until you
> > start running into changes that the submitter and reviewers all *think*
> > should only have impact in a bounded area, but that turns out to break
> > stuff in surprising places outside those bounds.  That's probably rare
> > but when it happens it'll gum up the works - in a seemingly not very
> > related area that's been caught in the cross-fire.  In particular, this
> > sort of thing happens more readily when disparate things use each
> > others private APIs, as sketched above.
> > 
> > [*] The case of doc fixes is probably relatively safe, of course; but if
> > this is applied to other changes, we can't be assured of as much safety.
> > One of the scripts involved in my API change review generator knows to
> > ignore various changes that "make no difference"; we could apply
> > something like that to changes to say "needs minimal testing"; but I'd
> > still worry about the cases where a change makes more difference than
> > the script maintainer is aware of.  Once we get to "this only changes
> > network code, we don't need to test graphics" (or vice versa) you can
> > start to expect sporadic surprises.
> > 
> > Not that the present state of affairs entirely avoids that situation.
> > In commit qtbase's 641eb4a965 I reverted the introduction of GPU
> > blacklisting, since it's no longer used; in the process, I renamed
> > QTestPrivate::checkBlackLists() back to the singular name it'd had
> > before GPU blcaklists were introduced, confidently expecting that to
> > have no impact outside QtTestLib.  That broke qtdeclarative, because it
> > actually uses this private API (in implementing the QML test framework),
> > resulting in a crisis that Liang fixed with qtbase's af6d4d068.  That
> > would have been avoided by a monorepo, but not if we were only building
> > and testing the parts we believed should be affected.
> > 
> > So we need to be deliberate about refraining from and objecting to
> > cross-component use of private parts, all the more so if we're going to
> > a monorepo.  We should also document, alongside each private API, any
> > known violations of its privacy; normally, those are done by friend
> > declarations, but non-class cases (like the QTestPrivate namespace) need
> > comments about such things (and those comments need to be specific
> > enough that someone finding them years later can determine whether
> > they've gone out of date).
> > 
> > 
> > 	Eddy.
> > 
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