Blacklisting of PIM from the CI system

[Ingo Klöcker]

[Intentionally top posting; CCing the CWG, but excluding kde-core-devel and 
kde-devel.]

Hi Ben,

I can understand that you are extremely annoyed by the nths disturbance of the 
CI system by some PIM projects, but quite frankly I find your reaction 
questionable. You seem to imply that the KDE PIM developers are sabotaging the 
CI system on purpose. Maybe they are careless and need to be disciplined, but 
I'm not sure that publicly (by that I mean on mailing lists other than kde-
pim; of course, kde-pim is also public) accusing them of intentional bad 
behavior ("over 2 days ago, there is no excuse for this series of build 
failures") was called for. In my opinion, your blacklisting of PIM and 
threatening of continued exclusion from CI is bordering at abuse of power. You 
are acting as judge, jury, and executioner in one person which I find 
disturbing.

Regards,
Ingo


On Samstag, 30. November 2019 19:14:38 CET Ben Cooksley wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> This morning I went to look into provisioning a new Windows Builder
> node for the CI system, but hit a roadblock created by PIM currently
> failing to build from source.
> 
> As some background to this, we use Craft to provide various
> dependencies of our projects that aren't provided by Windows itself
> (such as Qt, gettext, poppler and so forth). From time to time this is
> updated to provide newer versions of software, but unless it is
> necessary for a project, the CI nodes themselves often aren't updated.
> 
> We use the same approach for both Linux and FreeBSD, except those
> dependencies are provided by the distribution for those two.
> 
> This means that when it comes time to provision a new node, all of the
> nodes need to be updated. As these changes essentially always break
> compatibility in some form or another this makes it necessary for us
> to rebuild all the KDE software as well.
> 
> It is therefore not possible to proceed with any of the above while
> something is failing to build.
> 
> Which is where the problem with PIM comes in - because it currently
> has many repositories failing to build from source on all platforms
> those builds are enabled for (including Linux and FreeBSD).
> 
> Given that the PIM project mailing list is emailed by the CI system,
> and that the changes in one case were pushed over 2 days ago, there is
> no excuse for this series of build failures.
> 
> In addition to all of the above, this round of updates was to lay the
> ground work for adding additional dependencies which are necessary for
> the builds of Digikam and SubtitleComposer to commence on the CI
> system for Windows. These failures by PIM have therefore indirectly
> harmed other KDE projects.
> 
> As this is not the first time that PIM has caused issues in this
> manner, I would therefore like to proceed with blacklisting PIM from
> the CI system. This would include prohibiting other projects from
> depending on any part of PIM, so those projects that have a required
> dependency on PIM would also have their builds removed by this.
> 
> Whilst I would prefer another solution to this, given that it is a
> recurring issue that makes maintenance of the CI system substantially
> harder, I see the removal of PIM from the equation as the only
> reasonable path forward.
> 
> Should the PIM developers wish to avoid this consequence for their
> actions, they will need to provide an action plan as to how this will
> be avoided in the future.
> 
> Fixing the current set of failures will not prevent this blacklisting
> action from being carried out - as a recurring issue it needs a
> permanent solution.
> 
> Regards,
> Ben Cooksley
> KDE Sysadmin

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