Draft Policy: Dependency Changes and CI

[Eike Hein]

Hi devs,

this month, a heated exchange on kde-core-devel about a dep
change breaking CI has moved us to draft a new policy to better
handle situations like this in the future.

While not "law", the policy _strongly_ suggests some guidelines
forming a quid-pro-pro protocol between developers and sysadmin
when it comes to making software dependency changes that impact
provisioning of the CI system. It should leave everyone with a
solid idea of what is expected of them and how to behave around
dependency changes.

Essentially, it requires developers to put sysadmin in the loop
when pre-announcing dep changes, giving them some time to ready
the CI system environment, and giving them an opportunity to ask
for more time when needed, while leaving maintainers/teams in
ultimate control over making the change. Meanwhile, sysadmin
does its best to procure new deps or communicate if/why it can't.
Worst case scenarios/failure modes and when and where to escalate
special cases are specified as well.

The draft is located here:

https://community.kde.org/Policies/Dependency_Changes_and_CI

While it's not too late to raise objections and comments, please
only do so after reviewing the kde-core-devel thread that lead
to its creation to see how it stands in the big picture. A
sizable number have already deliberated this draft. It's con-
structive to assume they did so with care.

The thread:

https://marc.info/?t=148360605500002&r=1&w=2

The current plan calls for linking the new policy from the
/Policies/ overview page at the start of February, thereby
making it official and putting it into action. And then we
live with it for some time and see if it serves us well
going forward.


Cheers,
Eike