On Thu, 2020-04-02 at 21:58 +0200, Clement Verna wrote:
[evolution is still crashing. sigh. such is life. apologies for
formatting, again]
> So yeah, let's discount the releng folks first, because
releng has
> existed all along, and - as I said - my original statement was not
about
> "people who are organizationally in the same team as the
people who
work
> on Fedora app stuff" but "people who work on Fedora
app stuff". So
that
> lets out Mohan and Tomas.
>
I don't think this is fair at all, Tomas and Mohan are doing a lot of
development and trying to improve a lot of the tooling around releng
so
that we move from a manual heavy process to a more automated or at
least
tool assisted process. If you consider that releng tooling is not
application work, then please explain to me what is bodhi,
release-monitoring, anitya, mdapi etc ... It seems to me that these
services are 100% release engineering focused.
I think we've more or less beaten this list thing to death and maybe we
don't actually disagree at all (can we say it actually turns out to be
more or less a wash and move on? I am at this point willing to concede
that my impression that the headcount was *higher* before was
mistaken), but I didn't mean "discount them" in the sense of "discount
their contributions", I meant "discount them from the comparison",
because I didn't include the people working in releng two years ago in
the "before" list. We could add the current releng people to the
"now"
list and the previous releng people to the "before" list, but what
would be the point, beyond beating this dead horse even harder? :)
Here's Vipul's lists:
>
https://github.com/siddharthvipul
>
https://pagure.io/user/siddharthvipul1
>
> he seems to work exclusively on CentOS CI. Okay, Fedora *uses*
CentOS
> CI, but presumably back in the 2018 timeframe, someone (whether
that's
> Vipul or someone else) was working on CentOS CI who wasn't
included
in
> my list, because I only listed people working on Fedora stuff.
So
this
> still seems like a wash.
>
Vipul and I have done extensive work to add the OSBS aarch64 cluster
in
staging, and it might comes as a surprise but yes we are working as a
team
and even sometimes pair programing and sharing knowledge. But you
will find
some of Vipul's contribution on the ansible repo git logs. Also
this
work
is directly coming as a request from the council to support the IOT
objective, so I think it is fair to count it as "development" work
even
if
this was mostly operation work and deploying a new OpenShift cluster
for
OSBS, since this time could have been spend on other application if
that
was asked by the council.
Same point: I wasn't meaning to dismiss anyone's contributions, only to
try and keep the *comparison* valid, so it's not valid to include
"people working on CentOS CI" in the 'now' list (as they're now
accounted as part of 'CPE') but not include people who were working on
CentOS CI in the "then" list (because they weren't part of 'Fedora
infra'). But please let's just leave this point now? :)
Yeah we are even, and we have 2 new persons joining the team next
week with
a more sysadmin/operation profile because we really need to support
nirik
and smooge in that area. I think what you are failing to see is that
for
roughly the same team, there is much more thing to do. The project
keeps
adding new things, we now have containers, flatpaks, IoT,
silverblue,
CoreOS and this is good thing but it adds more work on the team for
example
the releng work that was needed 5 years ago has now triple, same
thing on
the infra side. On the application development, tools and application
have
to be adapted to take care of these new deliverables. I am pretty
sure you
know this very well because that must impact you also on the QA side.
Yeah, you're right, so I'm certainly not "failing to see" that. But I
think we may have lost track of where this discussion got started. Let
me quote myself from right back at the start:
"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."
*that's* where this whole "headcount" subthread kicked off. As I
mentioned above, I'm now willing to admit that my impression that there
was an "apparent significant headcount reduction" was off the mark, but
to me it seems that in saying "for roughly the same team, there is much
more thing to do", you're *supporting* my initial point here, if
anything, right?
> To be really clear: I don't want the takeaway from this to
be "Adam
is
> very mad and doesn't want CPE to be allowed to work on cool
new
projects
> any more". I like cool new projects! Cool new projects are
great! I
> write them myself sometimes! I'm just having trouble joining up the
dots
> here in terms of high-level strategy.
>
We are really starting with prioritization and trying to be better at
how
we organize our work, so yeah maybe not every is great, but I did not
know
that perfection was the minimum required.
Sheesh, I thought everyone knew that perfection is the baseline for
anything where LWN and Phoronix might be reading ;)
We also share a weekly status
update of every that is going on and welcome feedback and comments.
Also if
you think that we are really on the wrong tracks please feel free to
reach
out to the council or directly to Aoife which is working really hard
to try
to make sense of all the requests and needs that arrives at our door.
I certainly don't mean to give that impression. I meant what I said:
I'm having trouble trying to reconcile the various different statements
about resource prioritization from Smooge and Randy and yourself and
Leigh with the whole forge decision process, and I'm struggling to make
sense of it. In my head it is adding up to something like "we
absolutely don't have anything like the resources to maintain all the
legacy stuff (including Pagure) let alone take on new stuff BUT
continuing to maintain and host Pagure was absolutely a valid option
and one we needed to go through a lengthy decision process to discount
BUT "24/7 availability in an SLA model and not hosted by the CPE team"
was a top level requirement BUT we do have the resources to work on
*this* new thing..."
I'm not saying it *definitely doesn't* add up. I'm not in a position to
make that assertion and I wouldn't presume to. I'm just saying I
haven't yet found it all laid out somewhere where I can see how it adds
up. That's why I phrased it as "I'm having trouble joining up the
dots".
I think it is important to note that a lot of people in the team are
quite
new to being part of a community. Honestly I don't think we are
giving them
a really good experience. But what strike me the most is the little
trust
there is in our team. When a group of people is working as hard as
the
folks in the CPE team, (some being around during the weekends or
waking up
in the middle of the night to restart a service) is telling that
they
cannot sustain the amount of work they have, there is so little trust
in
that team that we have to go and check the commit logs of these
people to
see on what they are working and if this time is well invested.
Honestly I have no words, and no motivation to go and fix any of the
tickets that are waiting to be fixed.
To be absolutely 100% clear on this: I am absolutely not trying to dunk
on the CPE team here. I deeply appreciate all the work you folks in the
trenches do. I am trying very hard not to denigrate any specific
*people* here, because it's against the CoC and I don't like doing it
anyway: as I've always tried to say in discussions like this, I
absolutely believe good people with good intentions sometimes don't do
things as well as they could have been done, and I absolutely include
myself in that group, and I hope I'm always open to the same kind of
feedback on my decisions (as opposed to me personally) from others. But
the thing I am asking questions about here is the *decision making
process* and the *strategic vision*, which if I have to pin it down is
clearly a responsibility of management.
--
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net
http://www.happyassassin.net