Committer Diversity Survey - Infra Related Feedback

[Luciano Resende <lu...@gmail.com>]

There was a private thread started around the infra related feedback from
the "Committer Diversity Survey", and it was summarized by one of our
colleagues as: GitHub, GitHub, GitHub, GitHub

I would like to bring my perspective around this, as I don't think it's
about GitHub, GitHub, GitHub, but about what GitHub provides for their
users: a self-service infrastructure that easily enables projects to be
created and administered by their creators.

I believe that most of the constructive feedback Apache receives around
infrastructure are triggered by the fact that it is still very hard to get
non-code related things done at ASF, particularly if you are new to the
organization and don't know the right people to ask for help.

I believe that The ASF (we) should seriously start discussing and come up
with a plan to make Apache a self-service organization (something similar
to https://whimsy.apache.org/  but much more focused on general services
and named something like services.apache.org) so that anyone with
appropriate karma could, as an example, create the necessary resources for
a newly accepted Podling by submitting one form and this would trigger the
creation of mailing lists, repositories all properly mirrored to github,
with all necessary workflow notifications enabled, etc. Which today
involves multiple steps, sometimes with interdependencies which can cause
the Podling creation to take over a week.

The other issue that I hear over and over again, is about the way we
communicate using subscription-based mailing lists, but I believe the
recent changes around https://lists.apache.org should have resolved most of
the issues, as long as the hard work from infra team is properly advertised
and linked from multiple places.

I have added infra and general as bcc to this thread, so others can provide
some feedback on the subject, but let's try not to hijack the thread into
different mailing lists and keep the discussion at dev@community.apache.org
mailing list.


-- 
Luciano Resende
http://twitter.com/lresende1975
http://lresende.blogspot.com/

Re: Committer Diversity Survey - Infra Related Feedback

[Niclas Hedhman <ni...@hedhman.org>]

On Wed, Mar 1, 2017 at 5:52 PM, Isabel Drost-Fromm <is...@apache.org>
wrote:
> I personally don't think re-building github on our side is a good idea -
I don't
> think this is particularly cost-effective. With that in mind I'm
following our
> experiments to use github as master but replicating the project history
to our
> servers with interest.
>
> I'd love to hear other opinions here!

Convince GitLab to come to ASF, and we would have the solution and people
willing to set it up... ;-)
There is no food like dog food.

However, I am not confident that they can be convinced, as they have had a
fair amount of success on their own.


Cheers
--
Niclas Hedhman, Software Developer
http://polygene.apache.org - New Energy for Java

Re: Committer Diversity Survey - Infra Related Feedback

[Isabel Drost-Fromm <is...@apache.org>]

Thank you Luciano for surfacing this discussion here!


On Tue, Feb 28, 2017 at 09:26:39PM -0800, Luciano Resende wrote:
> I believe that The ASF (we) should seriously start discussing and come up
> with a plan to make Apache a self-service organization (something similar
> to https://whimsy.apache.org/  but much more focused on general services
> and named something like services.apache.org) so that anyone with
> appropriate karma could, as an example, create the necessary resources for
> a newly accepted Podling by submitting one form and this would trigger the
> creation of mailing lists, repositories all properly mirrored to github,
> with all necessary workflow notifications enabled, etc. Which today
> involves multiple steps, sometimes with interdependencies which can cause
> the Podling creation to take over a week.

Someone from INFRA probably is in a better position to answer that than me, but
I believe automation already is a huge topic there at the moment.

However I think the call for github isn't entirely wrong. Github did add a
social component to open source, sort of binding people into it's community. It
also standardized many development processes - that makes it easier to contribute
to projects in a drive-by manner: Submitting patches, code review, merging
patches are all part of one web UI that is essentially the same for all
projects. On the flip side this means projects are less flexible here.

I personally don't think re-building github on our side is a good idea - I don't
think this is particularly cost-effective. With that in mind I'm following our
experiments to use github as master but replicating the project history to our
servers with interest.

I'd love to hear other opinions here!


> The other issue that I hear over and over again, is about the way we
> communicate using subscription-based mailing lists, but I believe the
> recent changes around https://lists.apache.org should have resolved most of
> the issues, as long as the hard work from infra team is properly advertised
> and linked from multiple places.

+1 - the service is great.

To be quite frank and honest - it could benefit from having a UX expert look
over the current user interface, in particular when it comes to using the search
integrated with it. Sometimes I find myself at a loss when filters applied to
one search are lost with the next. Maybe watching actual users use the service
would be helpful to put more actionable tasks behind that gut feeling.


Cheers,
Isabel


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