On Fri, Apr 3, 2020 at 1:28 PM Kevin Fenzi <ke...@scrye.com> wrote: > > 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. :) >
I'm trying. There's a lot to reply to now... :) > > 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. > I don't know if that's really true. You have a number of interesting apps, you have relatively popular infrastructure methods. There are a lot of people who'd like to learn and build skills in this sort of thing. There's even containers and OpenShift stuff now, so you can attract those people too! It took a long time before I even knew about these parts of Fedora! I found out in 2014 as part of a job posting that I applied to and ultimately was rejected for. I started doing work in Fedora infrastructure in 2016, and have been progressively building up what I've been doing since. I even personally know of a few folks who might be interested in contributing in this manner if they knew how. > > 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. > Well, there's potentially an opportunity here with all these people being affected by... uhh... current global events? > 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. > Do we have any formal docs on this? Could we even just get the pagure ansible repo working[1] so I have somewhere to send people to submit contributions? I'd love to be able to just fork the repo, do some fixes, test it somewhere, and then submit it for inclusion. [1]: https://pagure.io/Fedora-Infra/ansible > > 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. ;) > If *I* had a magic wand, I'd be using it now. :) Sadly, creating viable communities takes hard work. It requires research and outreach effort. What's worse, growth and sustainability curves are usually exponential (phase 1), then logarithmic (phase 2). At least with Pagure, some of the effort I'm doing is starting to bear fruit, and I'm still working on other initiatives to drive growth there. For Pagure Dist-Git, I've been focused on attracting other Linux distributions. For example, Mageia, openSUSE, and Trisquel are good candidates for this. There has been interest by others for it, especially in Mageia. But the problem is that Mageia right now runs a Dist-SVN, and converting to Git is the _first_ step. And in openSUSE, the usage of Git in general isn't uniform. Trisquel is probably the easiest of the bunch as they've got basically nothing right now, and the work the bring up a Pagure server for Trisquel is beginning later this month. Fedora Messaging is a wrapper around AMQP, as opposed to FedMsg (which implemented everything around ZeroMQ). Beyond the library (which is likely to be picked up in usage as apps that use it are adopted), I don't know what else you'd want? I know it'll wind up becoming available in openSUSE because I've been working with them to adopt Noggin+Ipsilon for openSUSE's new account system, and Noggin already requires it. Integrating Fedora-Messaging with openSUSE's AMQP infrastructure will certainly get interesting... modernpaste (which we used as a pastebin) is in the process of being revived as postmodern-paste, with folks from openSUSE helping to bring it up to snuff. There's already an existing effort for openSUSE to adopt MirrorManager2 in part or whole. I've also been talking to some of the other smaller distributions (like Adélie Linux) about adopting it and contributing to it. Mailman 3 + HyperKitty + Postorius are in the process of being adopted by a number of projects and distributions now, so that's finally taking off. :) Honestly, the main app I have trouble seeing a broader community for is Bodhi. It *could* be done, but I'd have to sit down and do a fair bit of work to figure out what parts are "Fedora-only" verses "Fedora-favored". It speaks volumes that even *Red Hat* doesn't use Bodhi, and nor does RPM Fusion. Is there something else you'd like to see broader adoption on? I can try to help push it along if I can identify folks that could be interested in it. -- 真実はいつも一つ！/ Always, there's only one truth! _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to devel-le...@lists.fedoraproject.org Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fedoraproject.org
