Help needed: conflicting interests between Salsa admins and Salsa users (Re: Git Packaging Round 2: When to Salsa)
Hello!
I've seen many times before statements like these so I'd like to raise
some discussion around the topic:
pe 13. syysk. 2019 klo 16.36 Bastian Blank (waldi@debian.org) kirjoitti:
> On Sun, Sep 08, 2019 at 05:35:10PM -0400, Sam Hartman wrote:
> > The Salsa CA pipeline is recommended.
>
> For this I need to use my veto as Salsa admin. With the CI people we
> have to work through too much problems first.
There seems to be a conflict between the Salsa admins and users of
Salsa: the more Salsa is used, the bigger becomes the maintenance
burden and the more computing resources Salsa needs. There is however
no inherent growth feedback loop in the system that would increase
maintenance commitments as usage commitments grow. In economic terms
one could say that the Salsa admins don't profit from maintaining
Salsa and as demand grows there is nothing that grows the supply at
the moment.
The reason for Salsa popularity to grow all the time is simply because
it is such a brilliant service and many Debian Developers and aspiring
new contributors love to use it. Personally I've had all my packages
on Salsa since early 2018 and I would never want to go back to the mix
of Github and Alioth I used before. Using Gitlab-CI is nowadays an
inherent part of my packaging workflow to test contributions before
merging them and to do QA before uploads. Any disruptions to Salsa
basically grinds by packaging work to a halt[1], it is so central for
me nowadays.
Since Salsa was officially launched in 2018 there has not been any [2]
new members to the Salsa admins group [3]. Alexander, Joerg and
Bastian have done a great job maintaining our Gitlab installation. The
software suite is a beast and keeping it running well is a major
effort in itself.
They need help going forward. The sentiment of restricting vital use
of Salsa is a sign of them trying to keep things under control. But
Salsa usage needs to grow, as that is good for Debian as a project.
For the Debian project I think it would be a priority to find more
resources to the Salsa admin team. I think that would be the ultimate
solution to the current conflict.
Personally I cannot commit to maintain Salsa, unfortunately. If Salsa
is out of computing resources I can however help find more sponsors
for public runners. But I have the understanding that Google has
donated plenty of cloud computing time and the root cause is not in
lack of computing resources, but in the human scalability aspects of
Salsa operations.
I hope somebody else on the debian-devel list would respond to this
call for help.
I am sure there are many ways to help the team and it is not just
about Salsa/Gitlab admin stuff, but also about creating structure in
the team, triaging issues, spreading best practices for users and
helping the most advanced users to grow into admins of Salsa etc.
Right now we don't even have any kind of salsa-related discussion list
on lists.debian.org. Thus I wanted to raise discussion on
debian-devel. In my opinion Salsa is becoming a very central piece of
the Debian infrastructure and it should have more attention on
debian-devel and from the project leader.
Thanks again for current Salsa admins for the work you've done! Salsa
is amazing and I hope it will get broader attention and help so it
scales to support our packaging work far into the future.
[1] https://salsa.debian.org/salsa/support/issues/184
[2] https://wiki.debian.org/Salsa?action=diff&rev2=37&rev1=17
[3] https://wiki.debian.org/Salsa#Maintenance
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