Proposed F19 Feature: systemd features

Sat Feb 2 02:28:33 UTC 2013

On Sat, 2013-02-02 at 01:25 +0000, "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" wrote:

> Feeling happy in the Red Hat position they invented for you in QA. 
> Feeling a big man now? Challenged accepted big man you have in your rein 
> of error effectively killed 2 thriving process in the QA community. Do 
> you really want to head down this road with me? Go ahead big  man make 
> my day!

Well, no, not really. We're not having a fight, here. At least, I'm not
trying to. I'm trying to discuss process. You appear to think this is a
battle for domination, but that's not how it looks from where I'm
sitting. I'm sorry if it came up that way, I'm not trying to slap you
down or demean you, I think we've just fallen prey to a bit of process
confusion here.

So, can we back up a bit? I've just read back the whole way through the
two threads, and it turns out to be a bit of a mess. I think the problem
is different people have different perceptions of what's going on.

So in the 01-16 FESCo meeting - right at the end, in open floor - there
was a short conversation about cron job conversion:

18:56:15 <Viking-Ice> on an different subject does it make sense to
migrate all those cron scripts to systemd timer units?
18:56:25 <mmaslano> what?
18:56:25 <Viking-Ice> all shipped cron scripts I mean
18:56:40 <mitr> Viking-Ice: what end-user benefit would all that work
bring?
18:57:10 * nirik has no opinion on it without looking at it in more
detail.
18:57:20 <mmaslano> Viking-Ice: as a maintainer, I don't plan to do it,
because I don't see any user improvement
18:57:37 <mmaslano> is there any?
18:58:11 <nirik> lets discuss that proposal after it's had discussion on
list or detailed proposal sent to us?
18:58:22 <Viking-Ice> mitr, fewer packages in install have not looked at
it further it's just recent that systemd gained "calender" support
18:58:40 <Viking-Ice> for those timer units
18:59:31 <Viking-Ice> I'll compile a list of packages that ship cron
jobs and look what benefits it might bring
18:59:42 <mmaslano> Viking-Ice: could you mention in your proposal what
it brings to users?
18:59:44 <mmaslano> ok thanks

This wasn't widely advertised at the time, it's not mentioned in the
01-16 meeting minutes (no #info or #action lines were given). So anyone
who wasn't at the meeting probably never saw it. The discussion does not
relate to the actual feature that was proposed - as we agree, that does
not cover cron job migration. And so far as I can tell you never brought
any kind of formal proposal to FESCo: there is nothing in the 01-23 or
01-30 logs on this topic, and you have not proposed a feature for it.

There was then the thread "Start of systemd timers after install/update
of a package". You mentioned that you had looked into the migration
possibilities and come to a list of 38 cron jobs in service related
packages. There was a bit of follow-up discussion between you and
Marcela; other principals in the current discussion weren't involved in
the thread at this point (Bill posted to it early, but never *after* you
mentioned your list of 38 packages).

Then we come to this thread, which was related to a specific feature:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/SystemdCalendarTimers . The
migration question was brought up early and quite vaguely by Marcela,
not clearly in direct relation to the feature but more as a 'general
concern'. You replied and clarified that the feature doesn't actually
cover the cron job migration, and re-stated that you were working on a
cron job migration proposal.

Then we fast-forward a week or so, and Bill replied to Marcela and
provided his own proposal for how to decide what cron jobs to migrate.

Now at this point I can kinda see how to you it looked like Bill was
'butting in on' your work, as now I've gone and done the thread
archaeology and dragged up three week old FESCo logs from the archives,
I can see that this has been kind of an 'ongoing thing' for you. But it
doesn't quite have that visibility for anyone else - the FESCo
discussion wasn't in the minutes and there's no public draft proposal,
and the references in the "Start of systemd timers after install/update
of a package" thread are somewhat vague and it's not clear Bill even saw
them. Bill was present for the open floor section of the 01-16 meeting
(I just checked my personal logs, as the public ones don't show
joins/parts), but he didn't say anything - he may not really have
followed the conversation. So Bill may not actually have been fully
aware this was something you were working on.

This was where the thread started going seriously downhill - in response
to three different people you stated more and more strongly that you
were working on the cron job migration thing and Bill was 'butting in'.
Again, I can see how it looked like that to you, but I think to the
others it didn't - I'm guessing the others, like me, hadn't seen all the
previous stuff. It looked more like Bill suggested a proposal and you
were claiming more or less by fiat that this was your area and he should
butt out, and that's what got people's backs up.

So now I've dug through the background I can see there's two sides here
and I'm sorry for not catching that you actually had been working on
this and you had some kind of justification for feeling the way you did.
But can you accept that it looked different to other people, and your
response was kind of overheated? When you start telling people to 'stay
out of this' and accusing people of 'butting into your work' it kinda
escalates the whole thing.

So, sorry again for not catching how this looked from your angle, can we
agree that it was the same problem on both sides and just move on now?
FWIW, it does look to me from the 01-16 logs like you and FESCo had
agreed that you'd come up with a proposal for the cron job migration
stuff, so it seems reasonable to ask Bill to work together with you on
that, or if it's impossible for you two to work together, maybe you
could both come up with proposals and FESCo could try to synthesize
them. Still, so long as you hadn't actually filed some kind of formal
proposal or feature with FESCo, it's hard for anyone to know this was an
area you were 'officially working on'.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net