Taskbot and Automation

[Kamil Paral]

> Before spending a bunch more time on this, I want to see what the
> general thoughts were on the approach.
> 
>  - Does the general concept make sense for Fedora?
>  - Is this something we should pursue?

I already commented in the blog a bit, so just a recap: I feel we need to move forward in this direction sooner or later, because the lack of basic automation is a really pain in Fedora. Also a lot of people are asking for it and could leverage such a system. Your currently proposed concept (when leaving out technical details, e.g. whether something should use JSON or REST, which I'm not really experienced enough to discuss properly) looks very good. Of course we will need to think deeply about each part to make sure we didn't forget any important use case.

I'd love to re-use any many bits as possible (either already developer by us or some existing third-party tools/libraries), because re-inventing every wheel just to create a "perfect fit" is extremely costly.

> 
> If so, I think that some of the next steps should be:
> 
>  - move the code somewhere so that others can contribute

Fedora Hosted or Github? I am not opposed to using non Fedora hosted services, and Github provides some nice bonuses, like integrated patches reviews.

>  - migrate the proof-of-concept system to either autoqa-stg or fedora
>    cloud systems (95% of the setup is ansible-ized so migration isn't
>    too painful)

Autoqa-stg is not needed at the moment, I have no objections to tear it down completely.

>  - polish the bits that are there so that they actually do most of the
>    things I'm talking about
>  - do some investigation to be somewhat sure that we're not ignoring
>    existing tools (autotest is first on my list, beaker is probably
>    worth exploring a bit)

This comparison will not be easy, the tools are large with lots of features. It might be beneficial to include their developers (e.g. lmr from autotest) in the discussions what we need and what the tools can offer. We have a lot of experience with autotest, but I somewhat expect that there are many more features that we haven't even tried to discover.