MXNet Build Services

[Daniel Pono Takamori <po...@apache.org>]

Hello MXNet Team,
I wanted to send an email to check in on your build services and make
sure we're on the same page when it comes to the MXNet project and
Apache Infrastructure.  As I'm sure you are aware the ASF has over 200
active projects and plenty more subprojects that we shepard. Coming
from the infra side of things, this can often make it overwhelming to
understand and work with the multitude of needs these projects
possess.

When MXNet was onboarding into the the Incubator I tried my best to
facilitate the transition and as such made myself readily available to
your team members who asked for it.  This might have been a mistake as
I didn't make it clear that I was giving priority to your project to
get you up to speed.  As it stands now it seems that your team might
think I'm the only infra member which can help them!  On the contrary
we have a great team of 5 people who are equally if not more
knowledgeable than I am.

The places to reach our team are on Hipchat, where we can try to be
real time but given workloads sometimes that's not possible, email
users@infra.apache.org for general infrastructure questions and
builds@apache.org for specific questions.  But most importantly is the
JIRA instance https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/INFRA  This is
where you can file tickets when you need help with things and we will
be able to look at them and work on them as our workload enables us to
(keep in mind we cannot respond instantly to each of 200 projects so
you'll have to bear with us).

Now onto the more technical side of things.  As you are hosting your
own build nodes and connecting them to our jenkins we can only do the
adding and renaming, etc.  Recently with
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/INFRA-15114  it came up that
there is some backend tooling at Amazon that Apache Infra was
completely unaware of.  It would definitely help all of us involved if
you keyed us into the overall design of your setup that way it didn't
seem like every single request in Hipchat was of utmost urgency.
Browsing the dev@mxnet list I haven't been able to find much
information about the build setup so I'm not sure where those
conversations are happening.

To summarize:
1).  The ASF is a huge organization and cannot give preferred
treatment to projects.
2).  I (Pono) am not the only Infra member that can help you
3). JIRA is the best place to get our teams attention for work items
4).  Discussion about your build system should be more transparent and
certainly include the Infra team.

Thanks for listening and good luck Incubating!
-Daniel Pono Takamori

Re: MXNet Build Services

[Meghna Baijal <me...@gmail.com>]

Hello Daniel, 
Thank you for reaching out to us with your concerns. I do understand your points and apologize for not following the correct procedures. 
We are making every attempt to address these issues. For starters, 
1. We are directing our build related queries to the builds@apache.org <ma...@apache.org> mailing list.
2. Opening JIRA tickets to get help from the Apache Infra team. 
3. And we have created a “builds" channel on the MXNet Slack workspace (apache-mxnet.slack.com <http://apache-mxnet.slack.com/>). We now have all our builds related discussions on this channel and anyone can subscribe to it. I hope this helps improve communication between our teams.

 
Thanks,
Meghna

> On Sep 21, 2017, at 12:05 PM, Daniel Pono Takamori <po...@apache.org> wrote:
> 
> Hello MXNet Team,
> I wanted to send an email to check in on your build services and make
> sure we're on the same page when it comes to the MXNet project and
> Apache Infrastructure.  As I'm sure you are aware the ASF has over 200
> active projects and plenty more subprojects that we shepard. Coming
> from the infra side of things, this can often make it overwhelming to
> understand and work with the multitude of needs these projects
> possess.
> 
> When MXNet was onboarding into the the Incubator I tried my best to
> facilitate the transition and as such made myself readily available to
> your team members who asked for it.  This might have been a mistake as
> I didn't make it clear that I was giving priority to your project to
> get you up to speed.  As it stands now it seems that your team might
> think I'm the only infra member which can help them!  On the contrary
> we have a great team of 5 people who are equally if not more
> knowledgeable than I am.
> 
> The places to reach our team are on Hipchat, where we can try to be
> real time but given workloads sometimes that's not possible, email
> users@infra.apache.org for general infrastructure questions and
> builds@apache.org for specific questions.  But most importantly is the
> JIRA instance https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/INFRA  This is
> where you can file tickets when you need help with things and we will
> be able to look at them and work on them as our workload enables us to
> (keep in mind we cannot respond instantly to each of 200 projects so
> you'll have to bear with us).
> 
> Now onto the more technical side of things.  As you are hosting your
> own build nodes and connecting them to our jenkins we can only do the
> adding and renaming, etc.  Recently with
> https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/INFRA-15114  it came up that
> there is some backend tooling at Amazon that Apache Infra was
> completely unaware of.  It would definitely help all of us involved if
> you keyed us into the overall design of your setup that way it didn't
> seem like every single request in Hipchat was of utmost urgency.
> Browsing the dev@mxnet list I haven't been able to find much
> information about the build setup so I'm not sure where those
> conversations are happening.
> 
> To summarize:
> 1).  The ASF is a huge organization and cannot give preferred
> treatment to projects.
> 2).  I (Pono) am not the only Infra member that can help you
> 3). JIRA is the best place to get our teams attention for work items
> 4).  Discussion about your build system should be more transparent and
> certainly include the Infra team.
> 
> Thanks for listening and good luck Incubating!
> -Daniel Pono Takamori