Proposal: use Hermit for Developer Tooling management

[KevinGimbel]

Problem description

While working on a PR I realised I needed to setup a bunch of tools by hand - namely yamllint and golangci-lint - before I could work with the code.

Automating the setup for new contributors could make the whole contribution process easier, and ensure everybody uses the same tool versions.

Proposed solution

Use the package manager Hermit, which sets up tools via symlinking locally scoped to the project. This allows the project to contain all the required tools.

Hermit creates a bin directory in the project which stores all tools needed.

New contributors need to install Hermit and hermit manages all the tools they need to work with the code base. New tools can be installed with hermit install <toolname>.

Hermit scopes everything to the directory, this all contributors use the same version of all tools.

Additional information

• Hermit docs
• Hermit repo

[marceljk]

Hi @KevinGimbel,

thanks for your request. I'll create an internal ticket to test hermit and improve the setup process for contributors.