General Infrastructure Maintainability: API and EBN

[Ben Cooksley]

On Sun, Nov 10, 2019 at 12:42 PM Philippe Cloutier <chealer at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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)?

That is a little hard to estimate, but I will see if it can be done as
part of a write up that Alexander and Adriaan asked for.

>
> 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

> >
> >>> Regards,
> >>> Ben
> >> Cheers,
> >> Elvis
> >>
> > Cheers,
> > Ben
>
> --
> Philippe Cloutier
> http://www.philippecloutier.com
>