Fedora Infrastructure hackfest 2018
Last week I had the pleasure of attending the 2018 Infrastructure Hackfest in Fredricksberg, VA. It was a very productive week and very nice to meet up face to face with a lot of folks I work with mostly over IRC and email. Travel went pretty well for me (direct flights, 4-5 hours each way) and the hotel worked out nicely. I liked that the hotel had a big table (with power!) in the corner of the lobby for us to use in evenings for more hacking. Our day workspace was a classroom at a nearby grad college. Aside from some firewall issues monday morning (They were blocking everything but 80/443) it worked pretty well too. Lots of tables we could move around, and whiteboards/projector. Monday we went over current package maintainer workflows and looked for improvements we could land. Pagure 4.0 (out very soon now) should let us fix the silly 'get a pagure token for this and put it in a config file' workflow. We also got bodhi to have a 'waive' button to waive test results from the web ui, along with showing what exact tests were missing or failing (so we can get rid of a hacky shell script on the wiki for this purpose). After workflows, we started on package maintainer docs rework. We wanted to move them out of the wiki and clean them up and reorg them. First we tried to identify all wiki pages that are related here and make sure we got all the popular ones, then we brainstormed some personas (new to packaging, upstream maintainer wanting to just package their project, someone who doesn't have time to follow process and just wants the steps to do an update, someone who wants to know how it all works, etc), then we wrote up a bunch of things these people would want to do and tried to organize new docs for it. It's not really yet in a state to get wide feedback, but hopefully soon it will be. Tuesday we talked about reassigning some apps that were maintained by someone who moved to other work, then retired a few apps that have been limping along that we no longer want to spend time on: darkserver (which actually has been broken the last year or so), and summershum (which got checksums of source file uploads), which we never quite figured a use for. Next up was rawhide gating. We went over the proposal send to the devel list and got more detailed about what exact things we would need to do for it. It turns out that just adding some things to the update object we could handle the case of side tags and the work won't be as big as we thought it would. Wed was setting up a AWX instance. This is the upstream version of ansible tower. We hoped that using it would give us some good advantages. Unfortunately we hit a number of issues. If we tried to install with a external db the install failed, so we had to move back to a db in container next to the rest, then we got pretty far on configuring authentication and hit a bug preventing SAML from working, then finally we hit an issue where we couldn't get our private repo mounted in the right container to allow us to have access to our secrets. There will be more discussion on this in the coming weeks and we can decide if the effort is worth it or if we should just keep on going the way we had been. As a side note we looked more at the loopabull setup we have. It has only one demo job in it, but it seems ready to add more into as soon as we would like. Look for us to use that more soon too. Thursday was more work on rawhide gating and some discussion around openshift. Patrick took the projector and he and Randy got bodhi's web frontend completely moved over to our openshift (but prod is still not pointing at these new instances until we are ready). We also did some more work on release-monitoring.org (anitya) and got it much further along. There were a number of tweaks and improvements to our openshift playbooks too. Friday we just met at the hotel as everyone was traveling away, so we just worked on finishing some things up. A few things that got done also over multiple days or between other issues:
- jenkins.fedorainfracloud.org is now redirecting to centos-ci. This is the jenkins used by various pagure projects to test their code. We had been working on moving it, but hadn't gotten to it. Now it's all done except for a more perm redirect.
- Various internal hardware/budgeting/ordering things were sorted out
- Tracked down and fixed our old cloud when updates caused it to stop processing copr builders right.
- Initial work was started on CAIAPI and the small flask based web frontend in front of it (This will replace fas2).
- Priorities were added to the infrastructure issue tracker to help set expectations on what issues are waiting on what.
- A new template was added to the infrastructure issue tracker to help us know what issues need to be done by and what they impact.
- Some thoughts for making the weekly meetings more interesting or more accessable to the developers on the team were brainstormed.
- We got RHEL 7.5 and openshift 3.9 all set to upgrade to after the upcoming freeze is over.