Cute Chess hackathon 2024
In mid-July we held our annual Cute Chess hackathon.
I spent the first days of the hackathon making sure our build and release workflow still work — they didn’t. There were issues with MacOS CI and Linux AppImage builds.
The MacOS build issue was because of Qt 5. The latest MacOS release is not compatible Qt 5 so I added a rule to skip that build.
Another issue was with AppImage builds: they would fail because of missing icons. I had messed up the installation directory of the application icons (though I don’t understand how it worked in the previous release) in the CMake configuration. I updated the directory and added more icon resolutions to support HiDPI.
I had developed custom LGTM queries in 2019 and 2020 but they were not used. With the deprecation of the LGTM service and GitHub moving it under the CodeQL branding, these queries stopped working. Fixing was more time-consuming that I had hoped. One would think that I could take an existing CodeQL configuration and just point it to the directory where our old queries were stored. Nope.
Maybe it’s my poor reading comprehension but I wasn’t able to figure what I needed to to based on GitHub’s own documentation. I don’t care about versioning, separate repository for queries — I just want my existing queries to work with the least amount of effort. It was when I came across this third party resource that I understood what I needed to do.
When reviewing our release workflow files, I noticed that the Windows release was still built with Qt 5 so next I looked in to updating it to use Qt 6. I don’t have a Windows on my machine because the experience is terrible. I used a virtual Windows to slowly fix issues in each of the beta releases of 1.3.2. I think I got all of them. My motivation to fix any further Windows issues is zero1.
After fixing the Windows build issues, I jumped to help Ilari to finish the separate time controls PR (developed by alwey). This change required testing on different operating systems and window managers to make sure it looked and behaved as we intended. We finished it on the last day.
Finally, I documented our release process.
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My virtual Windows installation stopped working after a Windows update on the last day of the hackathon. ↩︎