Last week I traveled to Fredericksburg, VA, USA with several members of the Fedora community for the 2018 Fedora Infrastructure Hackathon. It was a highly productive week for me and I think for others as well.
On Monday we spent some time talking about all the changes that happened to the packager workflow over the past year, with the aim of identifying gaps in documention and in some cases gaps in features. We developed a large list of documentation stories that would be helpful to write, and a subgroup of us spent a lot of time throughout the week writing docs. Though I only participated in the brainstorming component of this exercise, I look forward to seeing the new Fedora documentation project arise.
On Tuesday we spent the early morning discussing some applications that don't have maintainers, or that have maintainers that wish to step away from them to try to identify what to do with them. Fedora Infrastructure has a lot of applications and relatively few contributors, so this is a big problem for us. I hope that we can reduce the number of applications we host and/or write over time so we can focus on increasing the quality of the remaining projects we support.
On Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, I worked with a subgroup of the attendees to figure out a myriad of details regarding how we will gate packages in Rawhide. There was a thread about this on Fedora's devel list several weeks ago, so we finally got together to think through some of the details. We even got started on some of the implementation - I did some database modeling work, Ricky wrote some patches for the CLI, and Patrick wrote some Koji patches to help Bodhi manage side tags. I also had a brainstorming session with Ryan about how the UI could work for side tag management and I think we came up with some solid plans. There is quite a bit of work left on this project, but it was tremendously helpful to have face to face whiteboard time to plan out how this project could work, and to get started on the coding as well. We are hoping to have this in place sometime during the Fedora 29 cycle, given that we are able to keep it prioritized.
Though I am pretty psyched about gating Rawhide, the highlight of the week for me was when Patrick gave us a tour of how Fedora's OpenShift deployment works. I took a course about OpenShift about a year ago, and I also read a book about OpenShift a little bit before that, but it always seemed a bit hazy in my mind. Patrick's tour of our deployment and our Ansible code that managed it was tremendously helpful. Better yet, on Friday morning I worked with Patrick to get Bodhi running in Fedora's OpenShift instance on staging (technically we put it in production OpenShift too but did not switch over the DNS since we were about to travel home.)
As a follow up to the hackathon and because I wanted to deploy Bodhi 3.6.0 yesterday, I spent some time finalizing the deployment with Patrick yesterday and we now have production Bodhi running in OpenShift. We had a goal set at the hackfest to have 5 more applications running in OpenShift by Fedora 29, so this means that we have only 4 to go!
Oh, and I also created a new yak_farmers FAS group for Adam Williamson, though I accidentally added adamw to it instead of adamwill while simultaneously locking myself out of it, so thanks to pingou for fixing that up in FAS for me.