General Infrastructure Maintainability: API and EBN

[Philippe Cloutier]

On 2019-11-09 13:40, Ben Cooksley wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 10, 2019 at 4:28 AM Elvis Angelaccio
> <elvis.angelaccio at kde.org> wrote:
>>
>>
>> On 09/11/19 01:33, Ben Cooksley wrote:
>>> Hi all,
>> Hi Ben
> Hi Elvis,
>
>>> 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?
>>
> My only concern there would be whether the project is large enough in
> scope to justify the amount of time commitment a GSoC project normally
> spans.
>  From my understanding of the problem in question it quite probably
> does not meet those requirements.

Do you have an evaluation of the time necessary (and for a student)?

I imagine there would be lots of work on api.kde.org possible if a 
summer is too long for just that. Do we still have a list of api.kde.org 
issues (it seems issues moved away from bugs.kde.org and I can no longer 
find a list)?


>
>>> Regards,
>>> Ben
>> Cheers,
>> Elvis
>>
> Cheers,
> Ben

-- 
Philippe Cloutier
http://www.philippecloutier.com