Seeking for future maintainer of Tea CI

[Qian Hong]

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Msys2/MinGW packages are outdated, Wine compatibility issues are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!


-- 
Regards,
Qian Hong