Sysadmin report on the modernization of our infrastructure

[Milian Wolff]

On Thursday 22 January 2015 08:25:08 Ben Cooksley wrote:

Hey, thanks for the clarification. I'll remove everything which I think was 
sufficiently answered by you.

<snip>

> > Furthermore, some open questions from my side, regarding Phabricator:
> > 
> > - is it really trivial to implement commit hooks, such as closing bugs in
> > bugzilla, with herald? With the demo above, it is not clear how to do
> > this. I can only "Block Change With Message" in a commit filter.
> 
> Phabrictor supports using regular Git hooks as well, so our existing
> ones can simply be dropped in place.
> 
> > - is it possible, and if so - how easy is it, to add bots to the review
> > system? i.e. something like a nitpicker bot similar to the Qt Sanity Bot.
> > The herald demo above does not seem to support running scripts which go
> > beyond the simple point-and-click GUI.
> 
> It is certainly possible, assuming the bot exists.
> Please see http://www.dctrwatson.com/2013/01/jenkins-and-phabricator/

OK, but I don't understand half of the article.

"You will need to install Arcanist wherever you plan to have Jenkins run these 
Phabricator builds" - on the server nodes that run Jenkins? Or on the 
developer machines?

And the libphutil stuff as well - where would that be put? On the Phabricator 
server?

And the phabricator python API bindings means we need to write a script, 
right? I don't see it linked from the blog post, what am I missing? Maybe this 
is clear to you as an admin who looked into jenkins and phabricator. To me, it 
looks quite complex to get up and running. Anyhow, the blog post below seems 
to be simpler, from my layman POV.

> > - Could, eventually, our CI be integrated? Such that, when a change is
> > landed which breaks the build, it's automatically reverted and/or a
> > comment added to the review page? There seems to be a "build plan" for
> > phabricator - what is that?
> 
> Build plans are part of it's integrated Harbormaster CI system.
> We could either utilise it to trigger Jenkins (see
> http://www.guywarner.com/2014/05/integrating-jenkins-and-phabricator.html)
> or use the method documented above to trigger Jenkins.

>From http://phabricator.org/applications/: "Harbormaster (alpha)
Continous build, not for the faint of heart."

That does not give me good confidence... But the two blog posts do seem to 
indicate that it can be made to work, somehow. And hopefully it will be made 
stable over time.

<snip>

> > - is there still an ATOM/RSS feed of commits? I could not find that in the
> > phabricator demo (note: must work without prior login)
> 
> I don't think so - please see https://secure.phabricator.com/T1928
> People could replace this with Herald rules and receive the notices by
> email instead though.

This is bad for me. Emails cannot easily be embedded into websites. On 
KDevelop.org e.g. we show a list of recent commits, which we get from 
aggregated RSS commit feeds.

But from skimming the bug report, it seems as if they do have Atom feeds, just 
not RSS? That would be sufficient. Can you confirm that this exists?

> > - can "common" herald rules be offered to users to save them some work?
> > I.e. a simple button to get an email for every "kdevelop" or "frameworks"
> > or "kdepim" or ... related review/commit/issue/... the more git repos we
> > add, the bigger this issue becomes
> 
> You mean some kind of template?
> It does support global rules, but they're quite different in nature.
> 
> It is quite likely users would have to add the repositories they're
> interested one by one to their own Herald rule.

Yes, like a template. The global rules cannot be disabled-by-default and 
enabled on a per-user level, right? So that is not option. I think this is 
definitely something that we should report upstream. People keep saying KDE is 
loosing community cohesion. Having the ability to easily track all KDE repos, 
or all frameworks repos, or all kdepim repos or... is something extremely 
important for us.

<snip>

Thanks again!
-- 
Milian Wolff
mail at milianw.de
http://milianw.de