Another proposal for modernization of our infrastructure

[Inge Wallin]

On Saturday, January 31, 2015 12:56:56 Jan Kundrát wrote:
> On Saturday, 31 January 2015 12:20:15 CEST, Inge Wallin wrote:
> > Given how few of our community who have participated so far, I think it
> > borders on pure falsehood to claim "clear consensus" on *anything*. I
> > would
> > put more like "some people want it", and I can certainly see
> > the appeal.
> 
> Fair enough, you have a point -- I suspect there is no consensus that CI is
> useful, or that there is any value in having a clean git history without
> "fix missing semicolon" commits. I agree that having a per-commit CI
> coverage can be well considered an undesirable thing by some developers.
> 
> Which is why I have no intention of pushing these to all KDE projects. What
> I am proposing is an opt-in for those who care.
> 
> > But
> > from that to simply state "the costs in HW are worth it" (and conveniently
> > forgetting cost in maintenance) is a very long step.
> 
> I believe that the cost of maintenance is sufficiently covered by section 5
> of the proposal, so I have to admit that I don't know what I am
> conventiently forgetting about.
> 
> Could you please explain what maintenance cost you are worried about? Is it
> perhaps related to the number of build jobs being run, or the number of
> throwaway VMs we use for builds? Is it about the services which replace
> Jenkins?

Well, all of the above and more.  Hosting, electricity, networking, manual 
work as the number of physical machines increas, manual work as the complexity 
increases, and so on.

Everything can be automated in theory but in practice there is never a fully 
automatic system.

> The scripting which is currently used for build VMs with Gerrit/Zuul lives
> at [1]. The bootstrapping part which turns a downloaded, minimal VM image
> into a build node is [2].

I bet these have to change frequently as code changes and as linux 
distributions and other OS'es change. Everything costs in time, money or both.  
And both resources are limited in KDE at the moment.

> Cheers,
> Jan
> 
> [1] http://quickgit.kde.org/?p=sysadmin%2Fgerrit-project-config.git&a=tree
> [2]
> http://quickgit.kde.org/?p=sysadmin%2Fgerrit-project-config.git&a=blob&f=tur
> bo-hipster%2Fcloud-init.sh