Re: [Taler] Taler dev setup

[Christian Grothoff]

On 5/3/19 8:42 AM, Lukas Großberger wrote:
> Dear Taler community,
> 
> I had great fun working on the web-common, auditor and landing repo.
> With these it's fairly straight forward to run / build them stand alone,
> locally. Especially with the extended README instructions that you
> provided along the way, thanks again.
> 
> With other more elaborate setup procedures, e.g. for the donations or
> blog repo, it seems like the setup is dependent on a fairly specific
> environment (e.g. doesn't work if the Python environment happens to be
> an Anaconda environment). These are fair assumptions made, I'd say.
> Especially for a service that is not meant to be run on a very
> heterogeneous group of machines. I'm now just wondering about your best
> practices for setting up a Taler development environment.
> 1) Is it feasible and reasonable to set up every repo stand alone? This
> would make it easier for people starting out to contribute to Taler. If
> so, can we jointly create documentation for each repo on how to do this?

Sure, more documentation wouldn't be wrong. Documenting the setup for
some of the repos has not been a priority as they are mostly intended
for the demonstration (blog and donations in particular are in this
category).

> 2.1) How do you, core developers, set up your local development
> environment? Do you have one dedicated machine where you do the system
> wide setup and nothing else, a VM, possibly a dockerized version?

Everything we do should be visible in the deployment.git, there you have
(hopefully) all the configuration files needed to reproduce the setup.
And no, we're just running as normal users on a Debian GNU/Linux setup,
no VM, no docker.

> 2.2) How do you deal with submodule dependencies when you are actually
> developing on the submodule? I now symlinked to web-common in place of
> the original submodule, which seems hacky.

We (currently) use Git submodules. If you run

$ git submodule init
$ git submodule update --remote

the web-common should be cloned properly as well. Florian recently
considered moving to something different (but I'm not sure he intended
it for the web-common case), but for now it's just Git submodules.

> I'm looking forward to diving in deeper into all the Taler components :)

Great! Happy hacking!

-Chrsitian

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