The KDEPIM / Akonadi situation

[Volker Krause]

On Friday, 12 June 2020 23:54:19 CEST Ben Cooksley wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 13, 2020 at 7:49 AM Andras Mantia <amantia at kde.org> wrote:
> > Hey,
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> >  don't want to add much as I'm not active anymore and have my share of
> 
> fault
> 
> > for not fixing certain bugs, but I'd like to reply to only one thing...
> > 
> > On Friday, June 12, 2020 6:11:31 AM EEST Nate Graham wrote:
> > > However I think there is a bigger challenge that just the technical
> > > issues. My interactions in bug reports have been quite negative, I have
> > > to say, and I don't feel like the developer culture is very welcoming
> > > right now.
> > 
> > Sorry if you had bad experience, not sure what happened, but I can assure
> 
> that
> 
> > most (or rather: all) developers I worked with in the PIM area were nice
> 
> and
> 
> > friendly.
> 
> They are however, terrible at reading emails from the CI system. To the
> point I suspect they have filters sending such mail to the trash so it is
> never seen.

sigh, not this again please... Ben, you very well know I look after Jenkins 
issues at least once a day. Here's yesterday:
(1) manually triggered a number of PIM builds that were stuck due to having 
ran in the wrong order, I'm sure the Jenkins log will confirm that if you 
don't believe me.
(2) submitted a first step towards fixing the Android failures caused by the 
anongit shutdown, https://invent.kde.org/sysadmin/ci-tooling/-/merge_requests/
78, you should know having merged that yourself even.
(3) submitted the first batch of fixes for the broken Flatpak builds due to 
the anongit shutdown, https://invent.kde.org/packaging/flatpak-kde-runtime/-/
merge_requests/13 (still needs review)

The Akonadi/FreeBSD issue persists since more than 48h, so why didn't I look 
into that the day before yesterday then? Because I was fixing the Yocto builds 
due to the anongit shutdown: 
- https://invent.kde.org/packaging/yocto-meta-kf5/-/commit/
e5e32bcb41aa3922b0885de0ac3355a36bffad80
- https://invent.kde.org/packaging/yocto-meta-kde/-/commit/
e6925a5737ab8ec2fe9dd0281b58579c3fbb74fb

> Akonadi has been in a broken state for several days now on FreeBSD. They
> have received multiple notices of this to their mailing list, and yet no
> action has been taken.
> 
> Because other software outside of PIM depends on Akonadi, the dependency
> builds for the CI system are unable to successfully finish (failing in
> Akonadi), meaning the CI system is now effectively unmaintainable on
> FreeBSD.

I am very well aware of the ripple effects such failures can have, see the 
above work on dealing with the anongit shutdown fallout.

> Continued builds for software in Extragear and Release Service are
> therefore currently dependent on the Binary Compatibility of the system not
> being broken.
> 
> Should anything happen to affect that then all of those builds will cease
> to work and be unfixable. That is a situation that I find fundamentally
> unacceptable.
> 
> This type of issue has come up numerous times before, and is one that the
> PIM developers have failed to address.
> 
> I'm therefore at a loss for options going forward and think that the only
> reasonable and viable solution in the long run will be to blacklist Akonadi
> from the CI system, and remove CI builds for everything with a hard
> dependency on it, including all of KDE PIM.

I have finite time and prioritized what seemed to have most wide-spread impact 
(all of Android and all of Flatpak vs. Akonadi/FreeBSD), as well as things 
that are most efficient for me to fix (Yocto vs. FreeBSD, having the necessary 
setup locally). If there are considerations I'm missing here you could just 
have talked to me directly, no need to resort to threats.

Regards,
Volker