General discussion about GitHub Workflows

[jtxa]

This is a list of potential things to do in the workflow.
Attention: this message may be updated based on discussions and implemented PRs.

CI (Continuous Integration)

systems

• new linux (see Minimal ci workflow #7)
• old linux (maybe via docker, e.g. centos)
• windows: msbuild with VC++
• windows: ninja with VC++
• windows: ninja with MinGW
• windows: msys2 (see CI: Add Windows MSYS2, MacOS and QA workflow #24)
• windows: cygwin
• macos (see CI: Add Windows MSYS2, MacOS and QA workflow #24)
• select which compiler shall be used on which machine/os

jobs/steps

• simple build one linux with gcc & clang, run tests (see Minimal ci workflow #7)
• build docs (see Minimal ci workflow #7)
• build package for system #9
• install package
• test installed executables
• docs (see Minimal ci workflow #7)

CD (Continuous Delivery)

• build all release packages
• build PDF
• build doxygen
• build web-site
• publish web-site
• publish release packages
• publish to Ubuntu ppa and alike

QA (Quality assurance)

Different build with special settings

• with fixed language version (see CI: Add Windows MSYS2, MacOS and QA workflow #24)
• with coverage

Possible checks with MegaLinter

• *.sh: shellcheck, shfmt (see Add MegaLinter #19)
• *.css: stylelint (only generated css exist)
• *.html: djlint and/or htmllint
• *.md: markdownlint, markdown-link-check and/or markdown-table-formatter (see Add MegaLinter #19)
• *.yml: yamllint and/or v8r (see Add MegaLinter #19)
• prettier (formatting of yml, md) (see Add MegaLinter #19)
• editorconfig-checker (see Add MegaLinter #19)
• cspell (see Add MegaLinter #19)

Static code analyzers

• clang-tidy (see CI: Add Windows MSYS2, MacOS and QA workflow #24)
• clang-format
• IWYU
• LWYU
• cpplint (see Add MegaLinter #19)
• Cppcheck
• CodeQL
• scan-build

maybe done with the help of CodeChecker

more may be found here or here

Statistics

• scc
• Code Coverage, e.g. with gcovr

Dependabot

• Dependabot
  may be useful for being up-to-date on the github actions used in workflows.

[jtxa]

I know it's a long list, but I just wanted to write down the ideas of what may be interesting.
Maybe some people are interested in some of the points.

[sierrafoxtrot]

It's a great list, if half of it gets done it will be a massive win. I'm super keen to get a truly native build going which would be covered by the msbuild/VC++ I guess. Something we can ship without the DLLs. Sadly without msys2 or similar, running the shell script tests gets a little tricky.

I'm going to take a look at look at "build package for system" as I figure a simple cpack should be a nice first task. As I mentioned, I haven't dabbled too much with the workflows part if github before.

[jtxa]

Probably next week I can try to start with a Windows workflow, the GitHub runner has MSYS2 and CYGWIN preinstalled.
So we can at least make sure, that they won't break.
With my own old CMake script I have crosscompiled from Debian to Windows. So we will definitely also get something native running, it just needs some time. As I also do not have any experience with GitHub workflows, I need to google and read a lot.