Dear folks,
(Long time no see, hey!)
I know many Wine contributors are in WineConf, some of you might even be missing me <grin>, so it's the perfect time to raise this topic :)
And I know new Wine contributors join the community every year, so I should introduce a bit about myself ^_^
I'm Qian Hong, a former Wine contributor since 2012. In 2016, I move my focus from upstream Wine to Tea CI https://tea-ci.org
Tea CI is a *C*ontinuous *I*ntegration platform which supports building both Linux application and Windows application, it's the only platform which supports building Windows application without depending on any Windows License because of the utilizing of Wine. For people who aren't familiar with fashion words like CI, think about it like our Wine TestBot, which builds and tests software automatically.
Here are some examples of how people use Tea CI: https://tea-ci.org/mamedev/mame https://tea-ci.org/concurrencykit/ck https://tea-ci.org/Alexpux/MINGW-packages
There are currently 200 registered users of Tea CI, while only a few of them are active.
I (co)founded Tea CI as a non-profit project for some ambitious goals, which I'm shy to tell anymore because it doesn't work out. I admit it is not very successful, it wasn't updated for more than one year, Msys2/MinGW packages are outdated, Wine compatibility issues are remaining unfixed, Web UI is not friendly enough, documentation is not complete, the future is unclear, etc... However, I do appreciate lots of people who helped Tea CI in many different ways, including but not limited to Wine/Wine Staging developers, Cygwin/Msys2/GDB developers, Drone CI developers, Mozilla RR developer, Arch developer, and many many more.
I was considering shutting down Tea CI because lacking maintenance and other reasons, however, I received positive feedback from some users:
XXX (A startup) is happy to cover your server costs as a sponsor. If it is 98 EUR per month we can cover full cost. Would that help towards keeping it active? <<<
it is very convenient to do windows builds and I would use it more if it were updated and taken care of. I do have (and had) a few projects that could use it, some of them were commercial. <<<
I think this is one of a few projects providing windows builds without actual windows server. This alone makes it worth the while. <<<
I would be willing to support the project financially (though not the full amount), if someone would be maintaining and improving it (perhaps under your supervision?). <<<
It's been a solid platform, and even though we only build 'tiny' builds on a single platform, and not most of the components, we've done it for practically every commit these last 18 months. It will be a shame to lose it, and I'm not sure what out-of-the-box solution would replace it for Msys2/MinGW. <<<
We are currently using Tea CI in a major project, ConcurrencyKit. CK is a very UNIX oriented library, so Tea CI made things very easy. <<<
To be fair, I should also share negative feedback like:
I last used TeaCI for about a year starting ~2 years ago, using it once to twice a week. ultimately, various bugs from ancient Cygwin versions led me move most of my infrastructure to MSVC and use AppVeyor. I appreciate all the money and hard work you have put in, but ultimately, I have no issue if TeaCI shuts down. <<<
As one might see, it could be a pity if no one maintains Tea CI. However, due to personal reasons, I'm not able to spend enough time and energy to improve Tea CI, that's why I am hoping to transfer the owner of Tea CI. The most challenging part of Tea CI is keeping Wine compatible with Cygwin/Msys2, which requires experienced Wine development skills, and most people who have the skill are subscribing to this list :)
I know looking for future maintainers of Tea CI is much harder than looking for a job, people who have the skill are likely to have no time. However, I am still very keen to ask: by any chance, would anyone be interested in taking a look, or at least raise a discussion during/after WineConf?
If anyone is interested in a follow up of the discussion, I'm glad to answer any questions about Tea CI.
Looking forward to hearing from you!