On Wed, 1 Apr 2020 at 09:47, Panu Matilainen <pmati...@redhat.com> wrote:

> On 3/31/20 8:44 PM, Adam Williamson wrote:
>
> > I understand there are practical resource considerations and so on
> > here, but I still think this merits more high level and serious
> > consideration. At the very least, if we have somehow reached a point
> > where Red Hat is no longer willing to provide sufficient resources to
> > run Fedora on the lines the Fedora community wants it to be run, we
> > need to recognize that this is a significant problem that needs to be
> > properly aired and discussed and resolved. In this context I'll note
> > that the apparent significant headcount reduction of RH people working
> > on Fedora infrastructure over the last few years is in itself a
> > worrying trend, particularly if you consider it while reading Clement's
> > email.
>
> This.
>

I don't think this is correct, at least not in CPE, the team has grown over
the past year and every person leaving the team has been replaced (even by
2 persons in some cases). The problem in my opinion is that a lot of the
people that have setup and written the original services and applications
are gone, taking with them most of the knowledge about How, What and Why
something was done this way. That leaves people in the team now with a big
amount of legacy applications to take care of and not much clue of what is
going on.
There is also an historical taste to write in house applications for things
that don't really seems critical to the Fedora Project, for example do we
really need a custom calendar application ? or election application ? It
seems that every time we have a problem the solution is let's write
something to solve that problem, instead of trying to find a compromise and
reuse existing solutions.

Now when the CPE team goes and ask for more people because we struggle with
current situation, I can only guess that these non critical applications
are mentioned. If I was putting my own money to sponsor a team to help
building a Linux distribution I would be asking why do we have to develop a
calendar application or why do we need a custom git forge. I personally
find really great that the different use cases and requirements for the use
of Pagure were gathered and I am convinced that people working on this did
their very best to find a use case to justify the investment needed in
Pagure but it seems that we don't have such a thing.

I also appreciate that as a community developing our own solutions is
something important and something that seems to matter a lot, but we have
to realize that the development and maintenance effort cannot be carried
out by the CPE team any more. Maybe this is a opportunity to create a SIG
or a working group for people that are interested to carry on this effort.

Finally, I would like to make clear that I am not blaming anyone, and that
decisions made in the past, I am sure were taken with the best intentions.
But I think it is also important to recognize that it is legitimate to
question these decisions today as something that made sense 10 years ago or
5 years ago might not make sense in today's context.

Disclaimer: I actually have very little insight on how the CPE team budget
and headcount is defined, I can only image that if this was my own money
this is the type of conversation I would have. Within the team, I think
there is a general agreement that we are running and developing to many
applications and the effort to slim down that footprint lead us naturally
to services that appeared less critical (fedocal, election, etc ..) or
easier to replace (Pagure).



>
> As a user, I wont be shedding a single tear for GitLab over Pagure, BUT.
>
> There's something very wrong with the picture here, and this forge
> business seems more like an abscess that finally burst rather than the
> disease itself. I really do not envy being in CPE's pants in this
> situation.
>
> If the problem is lack of funding for Fedora infastructure, shouldn't we
> talking about that (finding additional sponsors or something) instead of
> which limb to saw off to ensure enough blood for the remaining organs?
>
>         - Panu -
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