General Infrastructure Maintainability: API and EBN

[Ben Cooksley]

Hi all,

Over the past number of years one of the tasks the Sysadmin team has
worked on has been improving the overall maintainability of our
systems, with a significant number of specialised cronjobs, exceptions
and hidden linkages being eliminated.

That is with one great exception: api.kde.org and ebn.kde.org.

Both of these are suffering from an extreme amount of digital bitrot
and special casing and in general are now in a condition where I
cannot say for certain whether it would be possible to replicate the
setup on a new system without us experiencing some degree of breakage
(some of which we may not discover until weeks/months afterwards).

In addition, the current setup relies on an old-fashioned overnight
reprocessing of all repositories, which is inefficient and resource
expensive. A more modern approach would have the various projects api
documentation generated on a delayed cycle from relevant branches as
part of something like a CI job (but not part of the actual CI
workflow itself).

For this one, i'm not certain on the best path forward at this stage,
however the current state of affairs cannot continue. We have tried
over the past few years to find people to work on a replacement for
the tooling involved, but alas we've yet to have success here.

Thoughts anyone?

Regards,
Ben