On 4/1/20 12:49 PM, Clement Verna wrote:
On Wed, 1 Apr 2020 at 09:47, Panu Matilainen <pmatilai@xxxxxxxxxx
<mailto: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.
Heh, I didn't even know about these calendar and election applications.
Of course, if you're running thin (on resources, whether human or
otherwise) you start with cutting the excess of course. That is obvious.
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.
But this is precisely at the heart of the problem: people feel they were
not given an opportunity to lend a hand, and that now its too late
because the messaging is that we go with GitLab, no matter what.
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.
Yes, world changes and past decisions need to be reviewed every now and
then. However I believe with any changes it's paramount to understand
and keep in mind the reasons behind the original decisions when
re-evaluating.
I don't claim to have read anywhere near everything that's written on
this topic, but at least in the blog entry I fail to see any mention of
the original reasons to go with Pagure. I frankly didn't understand it
back then (but didn't care too much), it's just that I find the lack of
reference a bit alarming.
- Panu -
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