Sysadmin Load Reduction: Subversion Infrastructure

[Ben Cooksley]

On Sun, Nov 10, 2019 at 6:04 AM Ingo Klöcker <kloecker at kde.org> wrote:
>
> On Samstag, 9. November 2019 01:20:01 CET Ben Cooksley wrote:
> > On top of this, i'd also like to remove commit access to it for
> > everyone but translators and those who need to work on the small
> > number of websites remaining on Subversion and only provision this for
> > people on an as-needed basis.
> >
> > In the next year or so i'd expect the remaining websites to complete
> > their migrations to Git, after which only translators would receive
> > access.
>
> Restricting access to the translations repository is against the letter of our
> manifesto which states
> "All source materials are hosted on infrastructure available to and writable
> by all KDE contributor accounts"
> https://manifesto.kde.org/commitments.html
>
> AFAIK, "all source materials" includes translations.
>
> There are a few reasonable exceptions for this requirement, e.g. for the
> sources of our websites, but I don't see a good reason for restricting access
> to the translations.
>
> I think restricting access to the translations will create a precedent for
> restricting access to other source materials and undermines the values stated
> in our manifesto. Therefore, I don't think we should go down this route.

The access isn't being *restricted* at all.
It is just something you have to request be enabled separately, and it
won't be withheld from anyone with a developer account should they
feel they need it.

There will be a proportion of newer contributors who will have never
worked with SVN, and will likely never need to.

Continuing to provision access to our Subversion repository for every
developer means that Sysadmin will continue to be limited in the
manner in which we handle developer account applications (because
people need to be allocated a username which can never be changed as
it gets baked into the metadata within the repository).

This set of requirements is part of the reason why we have issues with
Identity currently, and why some developers actually have multiple
accounts (as they've changed names, and therefore wanted to change
their username as well - we usually grant them a new account and
disable the old one when this issue occurs).

Given that people are likely to never use the service, and because it
creates issues for us to continue to provision this access as part of
the normal developer account application workflow, it makes sense for
people to need to request access to Subversion separately going
forward to reduce the cost burden of providing this service.

Should you feel it necessary, i'm more than happy to start the process
of amending the Manifesto to explicitly permit this activity although
I feel that what we're proposing here is more than permitted within
the Manifesto as it currently stands (there is no exception for
website repositories in the Manifesto either)

>
> Regards,
> Ingo

Regards,
Ben