Re: Please review 2.5 plan (non-development items)

[Hugh McMaster]

Hi Ondřej,

On Tue, 23 Jul 2019 at 23:38, Ondřej Kuzník wrote:
>
> Hi,
> I've prepared a plan what the project wants to achieve as part of the
> 2.5 stream apart from core OpenLDAP development that I intend to send to
> -technical for wider discussion and as a call for participation.

Two months have gone by, with a good level of discussion into this thread/topic.

Have any plans been decided on to migrate to Gitlab/Github and other platforms?

Thanks,

Hugh

Re: Please review 2.5 plan (non-development items)

[Howard Chu]

Quanah Gibson-Mount wrote:
> --On Tuesday, July 23, 2019 8:57 PM +0300 Alexander Bokovoy 
>  wrote:
> 
>> Azure Pipelines give free 10 concurrent runners for open source projects
>> and can connect with GitLab instances for CI/CD. We use it in FreeIPA
>> in our GitHub pull request review process. The runners are fairly easy to
>> configure; they run Ubuntu 16.04 but include Docker so it is possible to
>> do a lot more. FreeIPA runs tests on containerized Fedora 30, for example.
>>
>> And Azure Pipelines also have Windows and macOS runners:
>> https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/pipelines/agents/hosted?vie
>> w=azure-devops
>>
>> If you are interested, I can share my experience on setting it up. I
>> haven't tried Windows images as I didn't need them but the rest is quite
>> well working.
> 
> Hi Alexander,
> 
> That would be great, thanks for the offer. :) I currently build on Windows 
> using gcc under MSYS2, which doesn't seem to be an offering from MS (no 
> surprise
> there).  But I do see a project maintaining VC bits for OpenLDAP that perhaps 
> we could leverage ().

We should only be supporting gcc / MSYS2.

-- 
  -- Howard Chu
  CTO, Symas Corp.   http://www.symas.com
  Director, Highland Sun http://highlandsun.com/hyc/
  Chief Architect, OpenLDAP  http://www.openldap.org/project/

Re: Please review 2.5 plan (non-development items)

[Quanah Gibson-Mount]

--On Tuesday, July 23, 2019 8:57 PM +0300 Alexander Bokovoy 
 wrote:



Azure Pipelines give free 10 concurrent runners for open source projects
and can connect with GitLab instances for CI/CD. We use it in FreeIPA
in our GitHub pull request review process. The runners are fairly easy to
configure; they run Ubuntu 16.04 but include Docker so it is possible to
do a lot more. FreeIPA runs tests on containerized Fedora 30, for example.

And Azure Pipelines also have Windows and macOS runners:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/pipelines/agents/hosted?vie
w=azure-devops

If you are interested, I can share my experience on setting it up. I
haven't tried Windows images as I didn't need them but the rest is quite
well working.


Hi Alexander,

That would be great, thanks for the offer. :) I currently build on Windows 
using gcc under MSYS2, which doesn't seem to be an offering from MS (no 
surprise there).  But I do see a project maintaining VC bits for OpenLDAP 
that perhaps we could leverage ().



Regards,
Quanah



--

Quanah Gibson-Mount
Product Architect
Symas Corporation
Packaged, certified, and supported LDAP solutions powered by OpenLDAP:

Re: Please review 2.5 plan (non-development items)

[Alexander Bokovoy]

On ti, 23 heinä 2019, Quanah Gibson-Mount wrote:
--On Tuesday, July 23, 2019 4:37 PM +0200 Ondřej Kuzník 
 wrote:



Hi,
I've prepared a plan what the project wants to achieve as part of the
2.5 stream apart from core OpenLDAP development that I intend to send to
-technical for wider discussion and as a call for participation.

It has been suggested to me that people might want to comment/propose
changes to it so attaching a draft here. Please let me know what you
think or if you agree in broad terms it is fit to be circulated more
widely.


Hi Ondrej,

Thanks for writing this up!  In the section about the bug tracker, I 
would note that the plan is to use Bugzilla for the tracker (as 
opposed to gitlab issues) via Gitlab's built in bugzilla integration 
feature.


For contributions, I'd like to see something like 
 
implemented, so it's simply a part of the contribution process rather 
than us having to constantly bug people about it.


I agree with Michael that the FAQ should probably just be migrated to 
using the Gitlab wiki, since we'll already have that available.


On CI/CD, hopefully we can make use of some of the freely available 
resources, such as .  What we're 
particularly missing is Windows as a platform for CI/CD, which would 
have helped us catch the additional bits necessary for ITS#7585 for 
example.


Azure Pipelines give free 10 concurrent runners for open source projects
and can connect with GitLab instances for CI/CD. We use it in FreeIPA
in our GitHub pull request review process. The runners are fairly easy to
configure; they run Ubuntu 16.04 but include Docker so it is possible to
do a lot more. FreeIPA runs tests on containerized Fedora 30, for example.

And Azure Pipelines also have Windows and macOS runners:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/pipelines/agents/hosted?view=azure-devops

If you are interested, I can share my experience on setting it up. I
haven't tried Windows images as I didn't need them but the rest is quite
well working.

--
/ Alexander Bokovoy
Sr. Principal Software Engineer
Security / Identity Management Engineering
Red Hat Limited, Finland

Re: Please review 2.5 plan (non-development items)

[Quanah Gibson-Mount]

--On Tuesday, July 23, 2019 4:37 PM +0200 Ondřej Kuzník 
 wrote:



Hi,
I've prepared a plan what the project wants to achieve as part of the
2.5 stream apart from core OpenLDAP development that I intend to send to
-technical for wider discussion and as a call for participation.

It has been suggested to me that people might want to comment/propose
changes to it so attaching a draft here. Please let me know what you
think or if you agree in broad terms it is fit to be circulated more
widely.


Hi Ondrej,

Thanks for writing this up!  In the section about the bug tracker, I would 
note that the plan is to use Bugzilla for the tracker (as opposed to gitlab 
issues) via Gitlab's built in bugzilla integration feature.


For contributions, I'd like to see something like 
 
implemented, so it's simply a part of the contribution process rather than 
us having to constantly bug people about it.


I agree with Michael that the FAQ should probably just be migrated to using 
the Gitlab wiki, since we'll already have that available.


On CI/CD, hopefully we can make use of some of the freely available 
resources, such as .  What we're particularly 
missing is Windows as a platform for CI/CD, which would have helped us 
catch the additional bits necessary for ITS#7585 for example.


--Quanah

--

Quanah Gibson-Mount
Product Architect
Symas Corporation
Packaged, certified, and supported LDAP solutions powered by OpenLDAP:

Re: Please review 2.5 plan (non-development items)

[Ondřej Kuzník]

On Tue, Jul 23, 2019 at 05:03:48PM +0200, Michael Ströder wrote:
> On 7/23/19 3:37 PM, Ondřej Kuzník wrote:
>> I've prepared a plan what the project wants to achieve as part of the
>> 2.5 stream apart from core OpenLDAP development that I intend to send to
>> -technical for wider discussion and as a call for participation.
>> 
>> It has been suggested to me that people might want to comment/propose
>> changes to it so attaching a draft here. Please let me know what you
>> think or if you agree in broad terms it is fit to be circulated more
>> widely.
> 
> Thanks for driving this. Text looks good to me.
> 
> Eventually there will be lengthy discussions about various tools (now
> reaching out for the popcorn bag). So you might want to tighten it some more
> by suggesting all the gitlab stuff (Wiki, CI pipelines) as possible tools.
> E.g. AFAIK the Wiki in gitlab is just a git repo of markdown files.

Hi Michael,
thanks, will have a look into that. Lengthy discussion might be fun, so
long as in the end someone steps up and helps deal with the resulting
wishlist :)

> Regarding the test suite:
> Would it be feasible to use Python for the job? If yes, you can directly use
> the unittest module from its standard lib which gives you much better
> control, error handling and reporting.

Yes, I'll discuss that as part of the followup email that I've now
actually finished too.

> And I already enjoy using gitlab's CI runner stuff for this (but using
> static slapd.conf generated):
> https://gitlab.com/ae-dir/python-aedir/blob/master/.gitlab-ci.yml

Sure, that might help some, but we'd need the runners setting up and
they're additional infrastructure for someone to manage and pay for. Do
you think that should be spelled out better in the email?

Thanks,

-- 
Ondřej Kuzník
Senior Software Engineer
Symas Corporation   http://www.symas.com
Packaged, certified, and supported LDAP solutions powered by OpenLDAP

Re: Please review 2.5 plan (non-development items)

[Michael Ströder]

On 7/23/19 3:37 PM, Ondřej Kuzník wrote:

I've prepared a plan what the project wants to achieve as part of the
2.5 stream apart from core OpenLDAP development that I intend to send to
-technical for wider discussion and as a call for participation.

It has been suggested to me that people might want to comment/propose
changes to it so attaching a draft here. Please let me know what you
think or if you agree in broad terms it is fit to be circulated more
widely.


Thanks for driving this. Text looks good to me.

Eventually there will be lengthy discussions about various tools (now 
reaching out for the popcorn bag). So you might want to tighten it some 
more by suggesting all the gitlab stuff (Wiki, CI pipelines) as possible 
tools. E.g. AFAIK the Wiki in gitlab is just a git repo of markdown files.


Regarding the test suite:
Would it be feasible to use Python for the job? If yes, you can directly 
use the unittest module from its standard lib which gives you much 
better control, error handling and reporting.


And I already enjoy using gitlab's CI runner stuff for this (but using 
static slapd.conf generated):

https://gitlab.com/ae-dir/python-aedir/blob/master/.gitlab-ci.yml

Ciao, Michael.



smime.p7s
Description: S/MIME Cryptographic Signature

Please review 2.5 plan (non-development items)

[Ondřej Kuzník]

Hi,
I've prepared a plan what the project wants to achieve as part of the
2.5 stream apart from core OpenLDAP development that I intend to send to
-technical for wider discussion and as a call for participation.

It has been suggested to me that people might want to comment/propose
changes to it so attaching a draft here. Please let me know what you
think or if you agree in broad terms it is fit to be circulated more
widely.

Thanks,

-- 
Ondřej Kuzník
Senior Software Engineer
Symas Corporation   http://www.symas.com
Packaged, certified, and supported LDAP solutions powered by OpenLDAP
Hi all,
as 2.4 has finally stabilised and the ITS list is getting shorter not longer
(thanks to Quanah's tireless efforts), the project can finally tackle some of
the long-standing pain points. So this post aims to outline where we are/want to
move to as well as to start a discussion and hopefully get you, the community,
more involved on the road to 2.5 and beyond.

We would love to welcome more people to participate in the project and make it
more active and resilient. People of various skills and experience can make a
difference, I am personally happy to assist anyone who wants to contribute to
get up to speed and be able to do so, and for sure I'm not the only one. Also
OpenLDAP is about more than just C programming and I'll try to outline the main
areas where we want to focus our work in the short term here:

One of the pain points in the 2.4 release cycle was the level of testing done on
the code before we have released. There are issues with the existing test suite
that make testing hard and I will come to how this could be tackled in a later
email. In the short term however, we could benefit from having the tests we have
run more often and on more diverse environments. If you have a chance to run it
regularly, in a loop and report issues picked up, that would be a definite help.
If you could help extend the test suite to cover scenarios that are of interest
to you and are not appropriately covered yet, even better.

Another issue frustrating both users and contributors to the project has been
the existing jitterbugs bug tracker (a.k.a ITS), which has by now outlived its
usefulness. Plans to move to a project-hosted GitLab instance are being made and
this should make the issue tracker searchable again, help with triage as well as
greatly improve the visibility into our release process. Especially after the
migration, this would be another opportunity for anyone with just a bit of spare
time to help by triaging open issues so we can make timely releases of better
quality.

I'm sure everyone agrees our website could do with a redesign. We've started
looking into this but it has been a slow process so far and if you can
contribute here, that might speed things up. It doesn't need much, keeping it a
collection of static html pages, just a slight reorganisation of the content
that is more friendly to anyone visiting it for the first time plus a simplistic
design along the lines of many other open source projects (openssl.org for
example) would go a long way.

This leads to documentation, much of which is already hosted on the website.
While I believe there is good work to be done on the admin guide, it is one of
the better parts of our documentation. This is where user feedback on its
usefulness is more important, please read it, have people on your team read it
and show it people just getting started and report which parts are confusing,
how they could be improved. We also intend to document our contributor
guidelines in a more readable way.

The FAQ site however is on the opposite side of the spectrum and will be removed
at some later point. There have been two suggestions how to replace it. We could
host a wiki, which means yet another piece of software to manage and maintain,
or a static webpage site based on GitLab pages. My preference is the latter, it
is no harder to edit than a wiki, gives us more freedom and we wouldn't have to
maintain another user base.

Let us know what the pain points have been with OpenLDAP when you were just
starting, right now and if you have a suggestion how to make it easier to start
using it. Or if you wanted to contribute, has anything discouraged you?
There are things we might not be able to influence easily (LDAP itself can be
complex), but a fresh look might help direct efforts in the right direction.

Thanks ever so much for reading this far. This email is long enough already so I
will follow up with another one about my long term plans to overhaul the test
infrastructure and other tools that might be worth introducing to help with
setting up and managing OpenLDAP deployments.

Regards,