Vol. I – Fedora Council 2024 Hackfest

During the Council’s February 2024 hackfest, we discussed the future of Fedora’s git forge – that is, the platform Fedora uses for version control and tracking for packages, source code, documentation, and more. This topic has been around for quite some time. If you are just coming into this conversation, or would like a refresher, #git-forge-future is a good place to start.

Instead of one huge post, the Fedora Council divided the follow-ups from our hack-fest into a mini-series of posts throughout April that will cover all the topics we discussed and made decisions on. In each post, we will walk through one core topic, and share our discussion and thought process on how we reached our outcomes. The first in this series, because why not start strong 🙂 , is an update on our git forge evaluation. Read on for important information.

The Council arrived at two main decisions during this discussion. 

Pagure

First, the Council does not see Pagure as a viable git forge solution for Fedora’s future. Instead, we will investigate other git forge options which meet our core community values: Freedom, Features, Friends, First. When a suitable solution is found, the work needed to migrate to the new git forge will be shared. 

At a later date, the Council will announce a sunsetting date for Pagure, with ample time for projects to migrate to the replacement.

Options for an alternate git forge

Second, the Council examined a long list of possibilities, and eliminated those that do not fit. We narrowed down the list to these options we think might meet the needs and spirit of Fedora: 

In both cases, the Council determined that the project will need to run the software in Fedora Infrastructure. Fedora Infrastructure previously investigated hosting possibilities from GitLab at length, and could not find something workable without compromising on our community values for software freedom.

The Council is grateful to everything the Pagure developers have done for us, and acknowledge Pagure’s immense positive impact on Fedora. In the end, these other two options were what the Council felt we could honestly ask our community to use. 

The Community Platform Engineering (CPE) Team is a Red Hat-sponsored team that supports Fedora Infrastructure and Release Engineering with staffing, efforts, and resources. The Council will ask the Red Hat CPE to lead the maintenance efforts alongside the community. Therefore, the Council encourages the community to collaborate and support the Red Hat CPE in an in-depth technical evaluation for both options.

When these investigations are complete, the project will have at least two weeks of community discussion on the reports. Then, the Council will select an option and will launch a Community Initiative implementing the migration plan.

Share your feedback on git forge future

To keep track of feedback and conversations in one place, direct all feedback and comments to the #git-forge-future tag on Fedora Discussion. You can reply to an existing topic or start a new one.

This will be a long journey for us to take together as a community. Thank you for your patience and feedback as we go down this road together. Please remember to keep your feedback courteous, respectful, and aligned with the Fedora Code of Conduct.

https://communityblog.fedoraproject.org/2024-git-forge-evaluation/

#CommunityPlatformEngineering #CouncilHackfest2024 #CPE #distGit #gitForge #GitLab #hackfests #Pagure

This is a summary of the work done on initiatives by the Community Platform Engineering (CPE) Team. Every quarter, the CPE team works together with CentOS Project and Fedora Project community leaders and representatives to choose projects that will be being worked upon in that quarter. The CPE team is then split into multiple smaller sub-teams that will work on the chosen initiatives and day-to-day work that needs to be done. Some of the sub-teams are dedicated to the continuous efforts in the team whilst some are created only for the initiative purposes.

This update is made from infographics and detailed updates. If you want to just see what’s new, check the infographics. If you want more details, continue reading.

About

The Community Platform Engineering Team is a Red Hat team that is working exclusively on community projects. Its members are part of Fedora Infrastructure, Fedora Release Engineering and CentOS Infrastructure teams. This team works on initiatives, which are projects with larger scope related to community work that needs to be done. It also investigates possible initiatives  with the ARC (The Advance Reconnaissance Crew), which is formed from a subset of the Infrastructure & Release Engineering sub-team members based on the initiative that is being investigated.

Issue trackers

• CPE initiative tracker

Initiatives

PDC Retirement

PDC is the Product Definition Center, running at: https://pdc.fedoraproject.org/.

However, this application which was developed internally, is no longer maintained. This codebase has been “orphaned” for a few years now and we need to find a solution for it.

We are reviewing and having a critical look on what we store in there, see what is really needed and then find a solution for its replacement.

Status: In Progress

Issue trackers

• Tracker link

Documentation

• Initiative proposal
• ARC investigation

Application URLs

• https://pdc.fedoraproject.org/

Matrix Native Zodbot

With ongoing stability issues with the Matrix <-> IRC bridge and many contributors switching over to Matrix, Zodbot has become increasingly unreliable. The bridge is currently shut off completely. This initiative aims to provide a future-proof solution and allow us to conduct meetings without wasting time troubleshooting the Matrix <-> IRC bridge and Zodbot.

Status: In Progress

Issue trackers

• Tracker link

Documentation

• Initiative proposal

FMN Replacement

FMN is a project that allows people in our community to get notified when messages that interest them fire on the message-bus, making the message-bus more useful to people that are not directly developing or troubleshooting applications running in our infra.

The previous solution had plenty of tech debt which caused lag times between an event happening and the subscriber to be notified, so this initiative rewrote the service from scratch and is now live! Users are recommended to migrate their rules to the new service and notifications can also now be configured to email, IRC and Matrix.

Status: Done

Issue trackers

• Github project

Documentation

• Initiative proposal
• ARC investigation
• Documentation link

Application URLs

• FMN Service

DNF-Countme Update

DNF Mirrors Countme scripts are used to gain statistics data about the downloads of Fedora. Purpose of this initiative is to optimize the current solution by adding more comprehensive testing, removing unnecessary code and reducing storage consumption of the data. 

Status: Done

Issue trackers

• Github tracker

Documentation

• Initiative proposal
• ARC investigation
• Documentation link

ARC Investigations

Investigate moving registry.fp.o to quay.io

Traditionally, registry.fedoraproject.org was needed as quay.io did not support multiarch which it now does. The purpose of this ticket is to carry out some investigation work to confirm all the above is true as well as finding any other potential blockers to the move.

Status: Done

Documentation

• Initiative proposal
• ARC investigation

Spam fighting

We had plenty of spam on pagure.io this year. To fight it more effectively, the ARC team tried a few different approaches to recognize and delete spam. It’s now much easier to delete the spam user with all the spam it created.

Status: Done

ARC investigation/planning for FCAS

In order to have a quantitative understanding of how the contributor activity has changed over the years and to provide the foundational support to the Fedora Project strategy 2028’s guiding star about doubling the number of active contributors every week, it is important to have a service that tracks their statistics. This measurement would help make the strategy goal meaningful as well as assist the Fedora Council and the related bodies understand how far they have progressed into making this happen and identify the underlying particular problems that act as a barrier in realizing this objective.

Status: Done

Documentation

• Initiative proposal
• ARC investigation

Badges backend for new Service

Fedora Badges is a service that grants virtual accolades for milestones and completing tasks within the Fedora Project community. For example, a community member may collect badges for testing package updates on Bodhi when they test 1, 5, 10, 20, 40, 80, 125, 250, 500 and 1000 updates.

Status: Done

Documentation

• ARC investigation

Pagure to GitLab importer

With Fedora and CentOS now having an official namespace on GitLab, multiple projects want to migrate their repositories from Pagure to GitLab. This initiative is aimed to provide an easy way to migrate those projects.

Status: Done

Documentation

• Initiative proposal
• ARC investigation

DNF-countme

The purpose of this work was about investigating the current solution and it’s bottlenecks to identify what needs to be done to solve the following problems:

• Storage bottleneck when creating the intermediate database file
• Operations efficiency for the infrastructure team

Status: Done

Documentation

• Initiative proposal
• ARC investigation

Dist-Git decoupling & ecosystem mapping

The objective of the potential initiative is to move repository contents (including but not limited to source codes, Packit configurations, RPM specfiles) from Pagure Dist-Git to another platform and confirm that the associated tooling and services (including but not limited to FMN, Datanommer, COPR, Toddlers, FMN, CI, Monitor-Gating, Packit, Bodhi, Fedpkg) work well with the newer platform. The investigation aims to be as agnostic as it can be regarding the destination platform to help ideate a general solution for the compatibility of the associated tooling and services.

Status: Done

Documentation

• Initiative proposal
• ARC investigation

Epilogue

If you get here, thank you for reading this. If you want to contact us, feel free to do it on matrix.

As CPE members are part of Fedora Infrastructure, Fedora Release Engineering and CentOS Infrastructure, see also the Fedora Infra & Releng update and CentOS Infrastructure update.

https://communityblog.fedoraproject.org/2023-year-in-review-cpe/

#CPE #distGit #DNF #FedoraInfrastructure #FedoraMessagingNotificationFMN_ #Infra #Meetbot #YearInReview #YearInReview2023