On Fri, Apr 03, 2020 at 09:55:48AM +0200, Clement Verna wrote:
...snip...
(side note: can people please try and trim their replies to this list?
I know gmail makes that hard, but it's anoying to read a thread where
you have to keep hitting page down to get the next few lines of new
text. Thanks in advance for anyone who can do this. :)
Yes, indeed I see your point and this whole thread made me realize
that
maybe we have not been good enough at communicating that we need help. I
mean one way to see it, is that Red Hat should be investing more in the
team but another way is that we are failing to get more support from within
our community.
As Neal and Smooge mentioned it is difficult to contribute and help in the
infra and releng activities, it is not impossible but there is a very high
entry fee to pay which is to understand how all the tools and services
interact together + the history of why this was done that way.
Well, I am not sure I would say it's difficult at all, but it does have
a lot of challenges.
Fedora Infrastructure has always been open and welcoming of community
work. The VAST majority of folks who have worked on it (at least the
operations side) in the past or are now, started out in the community
and eventually ended up doing it full time.
On our side we want:
* people who are reliable. Who commit to doing things and do them.
* people who are willing to learn. No one knows everything, someone who
is able to learn is much nicer than someone who knows a ton and won't do
things other than the way they know.
* self motivated folks. Since we don't have much free time, we have
typically heavily weighted toward self starters. People who ask
questions, people who provide patches, people who ask if they can do X,
etc.
Unfortunately, this filters almost everyone out these days.
There were a lot more folks a number of years back, I think because back
then infrastructure was the hot thing. puppet and ansible and vm's!
But now more people are interested in containers/openshift/cloud
services, etc. We just aren't that interesting anymore.
In the same time, I honestly think the team does a good job at being
transparent and welcoming to people willing to help, we have weekly and
daily "standup" style meetings on IRC (infra and releng), we have started
to do backlog prioritization on the infra list. We have also tried in the
past to have office hours or apprentice day to help people make some
contribution. Unfortunately the reality is that we don't have much
participation to these initiatives. I am very happy to think that we are
doing something wrong, and if anyone has ideas on how we could improve or
make it easier to contribute to infra and releng please reach out.
Ditto. Happy to try new things or ideas.
On Thu, Apr 02, 2020 at 11:43:15AM -0400, Neal Gompa wrote:
For what it's worth, I think some of the problem here is that I don't
see many avenues for the Fedora community to take an active part in
the infrastructure. In the openSUSE Project, I'm involved in the
openSUSE Heroes team, and with that, I actually *do* have the
opportunity to actively assist with the deployment, management, and
basic maintenance of solutions used by the openSUSE Project. The
Fedora equivalent team doesn't exist. There is the releng and
infrastructure teams, but those are gradually being absorbed by the
Red Hat CPE team, and as indicated earlier somewhere, CPE team is not
a community team. The codebases and effort involved when not being
able to share it with the community is high.
We have groups for many/most of our applications that let people in that
group commit to ansible and run the playbooks to deploy things.
We have an apprentice group that has access to machines, so they can
look at things and propose patches.
Of course, as long as Fedora is using FOSS solutions that have low
barriers to entry for contributors (like Pagure, Noggin, Ipsilon,
Fedocal, fedora-packages, anitya, nuancier, etc.) and those projects
are advertised as ways to contribute to the Fedora Project, then a
good chunk of the burden on the CPE team can probably be lowered
organically. As I said in my original email, Fedora needs to be a
better steward and umbrella organization. By doing so, we can support
our enthusiastic contributors and make for a stronger community.
The problem is that a lot of our apps have a very limited userbase and
an even smaller community.
How would you setup a community around 'pagure-dist-git'? we are the
only ones likely to run that. fedora-messaging? all the various apps
that bridge messages onto the bus, etc.
If you have a magic wand that can create long term viable communities,
please let me borrow it. ;)
kevin