L10N migration to transifex.net

[David Nalley]

> So I'm still not following where options were weighed up in open
> consultation with the community. I agree with your reading of the logs
> that suggests:
>
> * a firm decision taken by some members of the infra team (who? when?
> what other options were considered?)
>
> * a firm decision taken by project leadership to support the previous
> decision (who? when? what other options were considered?)
>
> long before this meeting.
>
>
> I guess I therefore perceive a serious disjoin between:
>
> * the scenario described above
>
> * the depiction of the move as having been developed in broad
> consultation or being in any way democratic
>


So, as one of the guys who often lurks in #fedora-admin I know that
this has been a problem for some time. Numerous calls for 'someone to
maintain t.fp.o' have gone out, and a few different people volunteered
in at least the past 6 or so months. Most of the complaints I have
seen in the way of tickets about the existing t.fp.o instance came
from within l10n, as one would expect. Sadly, the state of that
infrastructure hasn't changed much in months.

So this problem has existed for some time, calls for help have
essentially gone unanswered (whether there was a wide enough audience
is a different matter, and I don't know the answer to that, but it's
also hard to essentially call out and offer up root access on boxes
that are important to fedora if you don't know the people in advance).

And unlike a democracy, Fedora's decisions (excepting legal issues and
the like) are made by the people who are doing the work, and the work
of maintaining fedora's infrastructure is done by infra, and thus they
made the decision that something had to change, and that discussion
started at FUDcon (actually long before, but really concrete steps
started appearing post-fudcon.)

I think you've taken the right steps to remediate the situation - eg,
identified it's something you care about, and are willing to spend
time on, and committed to doing so. Every successful infrastructure
project I have seen has needed a long term person like that - whether
it was Ian and the wiki, or Jesse (and now dgilmore) with the
buildsystems. Every infrastructure project that hasn't had at least
one committed person has languished (and now appears on the chopping
block). It's not really different than package maintainers orphaning
packages (and as a point of reference that notice only goes out to
people on -devel)