On 12/12/2013 04:02 PM, Stephan Kulow wrote:
Am 12.12.2013 20:18, schrieb Robert Schweikert:
I think we have long way to go to figure this out.
Hi Robert,
You appear very stressed. I wonder why - it's Christmas after all :)
Let's give this whole thing a more personal touch - instead of all that 'we's:
I want to improve our development process, because *I* feel the pain with it.
Ack, and we discussed this probably 2 years ago that something will have to change.
You don't and that's perfectly fine - but I spend every morning (this includes weekends) reviewing what hell broke lose this time. I implemented several measures and convinced my colleagues to implement even more. So our team was busy the last year or so:
- openqa improvements - factory-auto reviewer - groups of requests - repo checker - cycle detecter - Factory:Rebuild syncer - automatic setup of staging projects - webui improvements for reviews - legal-auto improvements - faster factory status page - working mail notifications for OBS ...
All great stuff no doubt about it and this makes things better for everyone.
But OBS lacks some features to get a good grip on staging with so many packages, so I experimented with fixed source rings (openSUSE:Factory:Build is the bootstrap cycle, openSUSE:Factory:Core is the minimal+X11 DVD, I'm not yet sure what the next ring will be, most likely KDE+GNOME live cd combined).
And it's *really* hard to do that as a side project - there is always something coming in the way, so I kind of hijacked Agustin's "2016" thingy to make the team aware about the basic problems of our current development process and we sat together to brain storm. Unfortunately we didn't even have the time to document the brain storming in a way fitting to a mailing list (I'm sure we still have the picture of the white board if you're interested in *that* form of getting informed :).
So the whole thing sat around a bit and when we discussed it again, we noticed some gaps and even more ideas. Agustin then made matters worse by insisting on having these ideas presented as part of a long term strategy - which it's not really. If you look closer, all we're proposing are 3 things:
- further improvements to openQA (that's a pretty small tool if you look closer, we can easily estimate the effort there - even though we can be wrong) - taking staging projects seriously including QA (that will require a lot of experiments and as previously discussed it might be easy or a total failure - no one knows) - talk about an improved trust system instead of treating all packages and all contributors the same. The discussion so far has shown that there is more to it than you believe when you sit and brain storm, but that's perfectly fine, isn't it?
Will this have an impact on the next release? No idea! Did I know for certain we would be able to release 13.1? No, I didn't. We still managed to.
As I said in another thread: I'll happily ditch 13.2 or the 8 months cycle if we find something better - and I do have my preferences there, but I don't think we even need to discuss it right now.
What I ask you (and this is Stephan not the openSUSE team): give us some credit.
You have all the credit in the world from my side. As I said, in this thread I think; All I can do is offer up my experience with a staging model. I have lived within it at the very lowest levels of application code development and tools development. I will not be able to help with any implementation in OBS, or other parts of the system. In the end those that do the work have to make the decision. The distribution and development certainly does not hinge on any packages I maintain.
Let us take some risks - and don't expect that we have all answers right now.
Sorry if it came across that way. I do not expect you personally or as the openSUSE Team, to have all the answers. But we should be able to work together at least on a list of things that may or may not highlight potential pitfalls to avoid storming off and implementing things to end up with an "oh shit" moment. There'll be plenty of those no matter how much we talk, that's a given. But there are also plenty of those that can be avoided.
I hear everyone talking about their expectations from the openSUSE team, but I don't see too many asking where they can help. So I guess, I have a question too: Why is that?
Let me hazard a few guesses ;) - everyone is extremely busy already - people are uncertain where they potentially can help - the intermixing of the rather lengthy discussions of tangentially related things has a negative effect on engagement. Anyway, if you or the team have thought about the concerns I have raised, and even if the answers are not complete, then it shouldn't be that hard to just acknowledge the risks and the potential pitfalls. If this has happened in one of the responses and I missed it I apologize. I do not expect perfection or having answers to all questions. All I can hope for is that my experience that I am trying to convey/share will not fall on deaf ears. As I said, I am so hopelessly overloaded that contributing any code to this effort is currently not even thinkable. Those that do decide. Later, Robert -- Robert Schweikert MAY THE SOURCE BE WITH YOU SUSE-IBM Software Integration Center LINUX Tech Lead Public Cloud Architect rjschwei@suse.com rschweik@ca.ibm.com 781-464-8147 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org