On 31. 03. 20 13:09, Clement Verna wrote:
> On Tue, 31 Mar 2020 at 11:41, Miro Hrončok <mhroncok@redhat.com
> <mailto:mhroncok@redhat.com>> wrote:
>
> On 31. 03. 20 10:36, Leigh Griffin wrote:
> > I respect that there is disagreement but Gitlab is the choice we are making.
>
> I always try to assume good intentions, but this is very hard now. I understand
> this statement as follows:
>
> "After collecting the requirements, we have not discussed the decision with the
> Fedora community, it was discussed in private. We have decided for Gitlab and
> only once we have already decided, we have announced our decision to Fedora.
> Now
> when the people who will be actually using the thing are trying to participate
> in the discussion, their arguments no longer matter to us, because the decision
> was already made, whatever you say won't change it, this discussion is
> pointless."
>
> Am I wrong?
>
>
> I just want to give a bit of insight from someone who is working day to day on
> Fedora's infrastructure, since I believe that might help give a bit more empathy
> towards the Why of this decision.
>
> For me the Fedora's Infrastructure is in a very bad shape there is a fair load
> of technical debt and trying to change or improve anything results in a long
> list of reason why we can do it because services X depends on service Y which
> depends on Z. Since I joined the CPE team (little bit more than 2 years ago) we
> have not been able to make any kind of significant progress towards fighting
> this technical debt. Every year we fill a white board with what needs to be done :
>
> * Python 3 apps migration,
> * FAS replacement,
> * fedmsg retirement,
> * FMN replacement,
> * Fedora-packages replacement,
> * PDC replacement,
> * Porting application to OIDC,
> * Improve Releng automation,
> * Improving Anitya and the-new-hotness,
> * .....
>
> Every single year the same items are coming back because we spend most of our
> time firefighting services to keep users happy and keep Fedora release schedule.
> This has a very demoralizing effect on the people working in the team, it seems
> like we will never be able to make any significant improvement, and our day to
> day job is to close couple tickets and you keep watching the pile of tickets
> growing. There is no feeling of accomplishment and a general sentiment that
> whatever we do, it will suck.
>
> A little over a year ago we have expressed our need to drop applications, this
> is something we have to do to be able to stay sane and keep a sustainable
> life-work balance. From that effort to handover applications (Elections,
> Nuancier, Fedocal, Badges) to another group of people in the community, not much
> happened mainly because of GDPR and the legal responsibility of owning such
> applications, but as far as I know we don't do much maintenance work on these
> applications any more since we now have a few volunteers that are looking after
> them or helping with finding an alternative solution.
>
> Now on the list of application we develop and run, I think Pagure is logical
> candidate to try and find an alternative to it, but before doing this it was
> important to make sure we captured all the use case and feature needed from a
> git forge and see if any of these justified spending cycles in development and
> maintenance work. My understanding of the decision is that Pagure does not
> provide any significant advantage over GitLab. I know that for many, the fact
> that Pagure is developed by Fedora is an advantage, but from my perspective as
> someone that as to deal with all the other services in Fedora's Infra this is a
> major disadvantage.
>
> Overall I think it is important to keep in mind that there is a lot of work
> happening behind the scene to provide the people in the Fedora community a good
> experience contributing to Fedora. I think we are doing a good job at it, but
> that takes us an enormous effort and over the long term this is not sustainable,
> also keeping in mind that we keep adding and want to keep adding new things to
> Fedora.
>
> I hope that my perspective helps a little.
Thanks. Just to clarify, I am not criticism the decision per se, I am just very
sad with the communication around it.
Most importantly the following:
1) At the beginning, it appeared that Fedora will be in the loop when the
decision will be made, but it wasn't. After collecting the requirements, there
was no Fedora involvement.
2) The use cases Fedora collected were (IMHO artificially) merged to "more
general" requirements.
3) The "I respect that there is disagreement but Gitlab is the choice we are
making" attitude.
I totally respect that this is a choice the CPE needs to make. I am just not
happy with the way it was handled.
Ok, I think it is good to clarify and I think this is a very good feedback.
As you said it always to good to assume best intentions and I honestly think there was no intentions of making this decision without the community involvement otherwise all the requirement gathering would have not happened.
My understanding is that there was a Fedora involvement, through the council. I believe that the council represented the community and Fedora's use cases during the discussion and decision. So I think that the role of the council was not obvious to everyone in the community, and that makes the all thing sound like the Fedora community was not involved.
After making a decision is never easy and communication is even harder, so I think it is good to note what did not go well and try to understand why so that it can be improved next time.
--
Miro Hrončok
--
Phone: +420777974800
IRC: mhroncok
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