Re: The Incubator and Infrastructure

[Erik Abele]

On 02.09.2005, at 13:03, Niclas Hedhman wrote:

On Friday 02 September 2005 17:42, Leo Simons wrote:

By all means, please help make it happen! Step 1 is subscribing to
infrastructure _at_ apache _dot_ org, if you haven't already.

up and unsubscribed a few weeks back.

After almost 2 years of trying to find angles of helping out, I finally gave

This is soooo ridiculous... just look at Leo: some time ago he was 'just' a committer, now he is a member and got even root access! Same with me and a lot of others. We were not born as ASF roots, just look at the archives: some years ago I started to explore our infrstructure as a committer, sent in patches to areas I had already access to and then, as people saw that I was working constructively, I got more and more karma. Why isn't that working for others?

Outsiders receives little insight how everything is done, the infrastructure repository is closed (although the realm says "ASF Committers" it is probably

set to members) and the bits and pieces that are open, must be dug up
elsewhere.

The infra repo isn't the almighty tool everyone needs. Most material in there (if not all by now) isn't instantly useful if you are not on top of the different setups. Furthermore you can find nearly everything on the machines itself, mostly world-readable; so the repo won't help you if you don't know where the live checkouts are living and how everything is pulled together. And if you are looking for documentation in there, you'll be disappointed - it's just too specialized on the different root or apmail tasks...

Sorry to say, I think infra@ overload is self-inflicted, being disorganized, non-transparent and "put out fire by hand" instead of preventive measures, automated procedures and "product development" attitude towards the tools.

a) overload is self-inflicted
Uh oh, just consider the following example: account requests.





b) being disorganized


c) non-transparent


d) "put out fire by hand"

To lower the load on this seemingly simple task, we tried to come up with an utterly simple mechanism to request an account: pmc votes in new committer, makes him sent in a CLA; the PMC chair watches for the receipt of the CLA and if it gets recorded, he sends a single email to root@ (cc'ing the PMC) in a pre-defined format and waits till the account is created. The whole process is described in detail on the website, we sent numerous educating emails about this. So, what would you expect to happen? Well, 80% of the requests root@ were receiving for a long time were completely out of sync with this process (e.g. CCs missing, CLAs not recorded, wrong spellings, completely different format, email mistakes, bounces, request not by the chair, etc. etc.) - it's slightly better now, but I hope you get the point ;-) Maybe, but keep in mind that we are all volunteers and that not only the ASF is growing tremendously, our hardware/infrastructure needs are doind so too. Old systems and services have to be kept running for projects who want to still use it, new systems and services have to be put in place (and administered) because projects are begging for it. The complexity is growing daily. Ask Leo and Upayavira how easy it is to set up a wiki (which btw, is running excellently for some committer's company: 'our 22 developers cannot live w/o it, why the heck isn't this available at the ASF?') for billions of clicks per day? Hmm, IMO infra is *not* non-transparent; it's just that the bar is pretty high (knowledge-wise and confidence-wise (in the sense of trust)). Please give me an example of what is so non-transparent; I'm willing to help you here. Well, that's the occasional hdd failure or worm attack or svn wedge or ... . It's pretty hard to come up with automated solutions to every problem so administering a system always means to baby-sit it in some way. If it would be solvable by a click on a fancy button, the managers could do it and we wouldn't need any sysadmins anymore :)

Well.... Good luck with your baby steps.

Cheers,
Erik

Thanks, I'm nearly outta here too - it's far more easy to support my own systems which have to take care only for a couple hundred users per second and not millions and, ah, making a living out of it instead of just fighting with a huge amount of of whining people, materializing in hundreds of emails :|

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