[gentoo-dev] [RFC] Services and software which is critical for Gentoo should be developed/run in Gentoo namespace

[Thomas Deutschmann]

Hi,

TL;DR: jstein asked council [Bug 729062] for a motion that any service
and software which is critical for Gentoo should be developed/run in
Gentoo namespace. Because any request to council must be discussed I
volunteered to bring this topic to the mailing list (sorry for the huge
delay!).


Problem
=======
You maybe all remember what happened to stable-bot: Years ago,
kensington created stable-bot on his own as PoC which revolutionized the
way how we do package stabilization in bugzilla. The service run on his
own infrastructure. Because of the benefit of the service the bot
provided, arch team’s workflow became dependent on stable-bot. We were
lucky that stable-bot just worked most of the time until the service was
down for a while. Nobody was able to help here: Kensigton himself was
unavailable, nobody had the sources… the end of the story: mgorny
created nattka which replaced stable-bot.

However, we are still facing the same problem: Only one person is
involved in development and knows how to run it. In case something will
break again and Michał will be unavailable, we can’t just push a fix and
watch a CI pipeline picking up and deploying new nattka. Instead someone
will have to fork repository from Michał’s private repository at GitHub,
make the changes and hope that anyone within infrastructure team can
help to deploy fixed nattka.

This is what the motion is about: This is not about that Gentoo depends
on single persons or things like that. It’s about the idea to
*formalize* the requirement that any service and software which is
critical for Gentoo (think about pkgcore) should live within Gentoo
namespace (https://gitweb.gentoo.org/), i.e. be accessible for *any*
Gentoo developer and deployments should be based on these repositories.
Or in other words: Make sure that we adhere to social contract even for
critical software and services Gentoo depends on. So that we will never
ever face the situation that something we depend on doesn’t work
anymore. Taking care of working pipelines before something is broken
should also help us in case something stops working so we don’t have to
figure out how to fix and re-deploy when house is already burning (like
portage: In case Zac can't do a release for some reason, in theory,
every Gentoo developer would be able to roll a new release).


See also:
=========
Bug 729062: https://bugs.gentoo.org/729062


-- 
Regards,
Thomas Deutschmann / Gentoo Linux Developer
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