1042669 - [tracker] reduce contributor pain

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Input :: General, defect)

Description

[Will Kahn-Greene [:willkg] ET needinfo? me]

Since inception, Fjord suffers from a hacking howto that involves steps that are non-trivial and require a certain kind of system and a certain level of experience to execute. This causes two problems:

1. it's sufficiently hard to set up a development environment that it's definitely a significant barrier to entry for new people

2. it's sufficiently hard to set up a clean development environment which would help track down some kinds of bugs


The second is a pain point for me (a core dev). The first is a big pain point for anyone who is interested in Fjord/Input development and thus a big pain point in gaining new contributors to this project.

This project covers the first pass for reducing the pain for setting up and running a development environment.

Comment 1

[Will Kahn-Greene [:willkg] ET needinfo? me]

The current plan is:

1. switch to vagrant and a vagrant provision file for setting up the
   development environment

   This should reduce the number of steps significantly and make the
   steps agnostic regarding what host operating system is being used.
   This fixes our pretty severe "it don't work on Windows" problem.

2. rewrite the hacking howto to a easier to follow Getting Started guide

3. update the generatedata system so that we're generating a sufficient
   amount of sample data for running Fjord

4. figure out what other things we can make easier, write up bugs and
   fix them

Comment 2

[Will Kahn-Greene [:willkg] ET needinfo? me]

Everything for v1 is done, so closing this out.