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.
--
Miro Hrončok
--
Phone: +420777974800
IRC: mhroncok
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