On Thu, 26 Dec 2019, Otto Kekäläinen wrote: > 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. The salsa ci pipeline itself has some problematic implementation details waldi lined out in the past. Afaik nothing changed, we had several reports where people telling us things are not possible on our runners. In the end most of them turned out to be limitations of salsa ci. Salsa ci is also not very efficent, therefore the veto. > 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. For more performane salsa would need a proper redesign by moving it from its monolithic system to a more distributed system. In fact we are already talking about it for some time. But in fact you - the users - should not think that everything is as easy as just adding some cpus, disks or workers. Things are often more complicated and - in the end - everything should be maintainable by DSA too. > 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. in fact thats only partially true. We are working on it and after my holidays are over I will plan another sprint for improving salsa. Things are not always as easy as it seems. Alex
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