Hello MXNet Team, I wanted to send an email to check in on your build services and make sure we're on the same page when it comes to the MXNet project and Apache Infrastructure. As I'm sure you are aware the ASF has over 200 active projects and plenty more subprojects that we shepard. Coming from the infra side of things, this can often make it overwhelming to understand and work with the multitude of needs these projects possess.
When MXNet was onboarding into the the Incubator I tried my best to facilitate the transition and as such made myself readily available to your team members who asked for it. This might have been a mistake as I didn't make it clear that I was giving priority to your project to get you up to speed. As it stands now it seems that your team might think I'm the only infra member which can help them! On the contrary we have a great team of 5 people who are equally if not more knowledgeable than I am. The places to reach our team are on Hipchat, where we can try to be real time but given workloads sometimes that's not possible, email us...@infra.apache.org for general infrastructure questions and bui...@apache.org for specific questions. But most importantly is the JIRA instance https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/INFRA This is where you can file tickets when you need help with things and we will be able to look at them and work on them as our workload enables us to (keep in mind we cannot respond instantly to each of 200 projects so you'll have to bear with us). Now onto the more technical side of things. As you are hosting your own build nodes and connecting them to our jenkins we can only do the adding and renaming, etc. Recently with https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/INFRA-15114 it came up that there is some backend tooling at Amazon that Apache Infra was completely unaware of. It would definitely help all of us involved if you keyed us into the overall design of your setup that way it didn't seem like every single request in Hipchat was of utmost urgency. Browsing the dev@mxnet list I haven't been able to find much information about the build setup so I'm not sure where those conversations are happening. To summarize: 1). The ASF is a huge organization and cannot give preferred treatment to projects. 2). I (Pono) am not the only Infra member that can help you 3). JIRA is the best place to get our teams attention for work items 4). Discussion about your build system should be more transparent and certainly include the Infra team. Thanks for listening and good luck Incubating! -Daniel Pono Takamori