[Insight-developers] A Contrib group?

[Bradley Lowekamp]

Hello,

I would like to propose that we need a Contrib group.

There has been recent push to migrate many contributions into remote modules. I believe this is premature.

A remote module is a good solution for medium to large contributions which are maintained by contributors. However, the current system does not leverage CDash or Gerrit. There is no easy way to review and comment on remote module code. Gerrit can not do builds for cross platform testing, and the night build systems does not easily test these modules. Yes, the module can be enable in certain cases, but this is not a sustainable practice.

Also for smaller contribution of just a class or two, the burden of code maintenance in increased when compared to just having it in the repository.

I would like to propose that we create a Contrib group, were these contributed remote modules and internal modules can exist. The goal here is that users can more easily turn on all the contributed modules if needed. Also I believe it would be do able to an option to our nightly build script, so that after the normal build a separate configure/build/test/coverage/submit can be done on the group.

This is my initial thought how how we can improve the current situation before it gets too unmanageable.


Brad