On Wed, 1 Apr 2020 at 09:47, Panu Matilainen <pmatilai@xxxxxxxxxx> 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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