General Infrastructure Maintainability: API and EBN

[Elvis Angelaccio]

On 09/11/19 01:33, Ben Cooksley wrote:
> Hi all,

Hi Ben

> 
> 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?

I'd say api.kde.org is too important to let it go. The EBN is less
important but still useful, I still see people pushing EBN-based fixes
once in a while.

Have we ever tried to use a GSoC project to modernize either of them? If
not, would it make sense to try next year?

> 
> Regards,
> Ben

Cheers,
Elvis