Splitting out UCIS tools into separate project

[cmarqu]

The UCIS support in tools/ is nice.
Other projects would benefit from being able to use it, which in turn would expose it to a wider audience and thus get more feedback, possibly improvements etc.
Would you consider splitting this out into a separate project?
I might for instance contribute a CI setup for it.

[amiq-consulting]

Hi,

We will definitely consider it. We won't rush into making a decision, as we have to assess the implications of this change. I will keep this issue open until we have discussed this matter internally.

On the note regarding CI setup, what are you thinking of more exactly?

Best Regards,
Dragos

[cmarqu]

Thanks for considering this request.

I haven't thought through CI/CD completely yet, the following are just some initial ideas.

• The "tools" part could be installable via pip (with a Python package uploaded to https://pypi.org/). The non-Python files under "tools" can also be put into such a package.

• Its documentation could be done with http://www.sphinx-doc.org/ and hosted at https://readthedocs.org/ (continually update from Github via a webhook).

• For fc4sc "tools", CI could be running the ucis_parser.py, merge and report scripts against (synthetic) example UCIS XML files of different complexity/with different features (including features not used by fc4sc "core").

  • The "gui" part is probably not stable enough for a full unittest with e.g. Selenium yet, this could be done later. It would also require that the UCIS file to be loaded can be given non-interactively, e.g. via URL query strings.

• For the fc4sc "core", CI could mean running a few examples and validating their UCIS output files against the XML schema, and checking the values contained. Plus, running the existing googletest unittests.

CI tools with Github integration are e.g. Travis CI, MS Azure, and, as a new player, Github Actions. I see many projects switching to the latter.

[cmarqu]

I had missed that you already have https://github.com/amiq-consulting/fc4sc/tree/master/doc/html, but it's not easily viewable in rendered form. It is possible to include the Doxygen information in a Sphinx documentation via https://breathe.readthedocs.io/ and thus have it hosted at ReadTheDocs.
(An example setup is https://github.com/cocotb/cocotb/blob/cba217edfde54fc29cc27c98db7d3d171ef25b82/documentation/source/conf.py#L301-L315)