Re: [gentoo-dev] CI services for Gentoo & Social Contract meanings of "dependant" notifications on depgraph breakages

[Rich Freeman]

On Wed, Apr 15, 2015 at 7:59 AM, Peter Stuge <peter@×××××.se> wrote:
> Robin H. Johnson wrote:
>> Why should we not be able to benefit from really good closed-source
>> CI tools that are offered for free to the open-source community?
>
> Because it may not be in line with Gentoo politics.
>
>
>> Jenkins, Buildbot and others are existing libre options in this
>> ecosystem, but aren't keeping pace with development.
>
> Politics that somehow matter usually require compromise.
>
> The (rhetorical) question is, what is most important?

Well, right now the alternative to what is set up right now is not
using anything at all, until somebody sets something else up.

The only choices we actually have in front of us are status quo, or
less-than-libre tools.  The status quo is becoming painful enough that
people are fairly desperate to get away from it.

The status quo isn't entirely libre either.  Half of our QA depends on
people running random scripts on their own private systems, which may
or may not be entirely open-source, and if they go away we certainly
don't have the ability to readily reproduce them centrally.  Given the
choice of travis-ci or a bunch of scripts running on somebody's random
tinderbox, the former is probably less likely to just disappear.  I
don't mean to criticize devs for running random tools and scripts on
their own boxes either, because without them we'd be even worse off.

If people want pure-FOSS tools, they need to make it happen.  If we
had a choice between an 85% solution that was proprietary and a 75%
solution that was FOSS, there is a good choice we'd line up behind the
latter.  The problem is that what we have is a choice between the
proprietary 85% solution that somebody has implemented, and a
theoretical FOSS alternative that nobody wants to do anything but talk
about.

So, I'm pretty hesitant to go in and say "stop!"

-- 
Rich