On 06/21/2012 08:04 AM, Robert Middleswarth wrote:
I saw in IRC several people who didn't have redhat addresses
testing the
projects. From what I have read this was an improvement over the 3.0
testing day.
Hi Robert,
Thanks for taking the time to both test and reflect on it.
your feedback is most welcome.
some notes below.
...
1) Need to set a process for adding people onto the team. Someone else
besides me has offered to help with the infra but there doesn't seem to
be a process to add people to the group. It seems to be really to much
work for the few people I see running things part time and it shows.
Karsten - can you please weigh in on getting the infra group bigger. not
every infra member need to own/help with all hosts, since each has its
own expertise, but more people could help maintaining them.
maybe a weekly infra call to orchestrate efforts around this?
2) Linnode and EC2 are great to get things running quickly but they can
also be pretty costly especially EC2. We need to start looking into ways
to save money at the same time giving the project more flexibility in
testing and building. There are several options for this but I always
believe in the old saying that someone should always "eat your own dog
food". So an oVirt or a RHEV cluster should really be on the table. If
there isn't already a working group looking into this maybe there should
be. I will be happy to be a member of this group if the team decides
this is a good idea.
we have two main hosts on EC2 - gerrit and jenkins.
the jenkins slaves can be contributed by anyone to the effort, hopefully
with different distros (and maintained by them to keep the jobs running
correctly on them).
I can update from red hat side we are looking at contributing more
hosts/guests to this not on EC2, for both cost and more importantly,
performance reasons.
the guests would be based on RHEV probably.
again, anyone can contribute computing resources to the jenkins effort.
...
4) We need to get at least el6 packages produced also I suggest we start
supporting all supported Fedora builds (Right now that would be F16 and
F17). A Debian based system would also be great. Having builds being ran
on more then one os will help remove some of the only works on fedora XX
issues that I am seeing in the code and commits. There are also bugs
that hide behind packages that show themselves rarely but become very
shallow under other OS's. I have seen that in other projects were code
that seems to work great under one OS will start to bomb under others
and so bugs that were masked get found and it forces the packaging to
get more generic.
i agree. both .el6 and debian are things i'd like to see and plan to
allocate resources to. this will go faster if more people pick some of
these up.
5) We really need a review of the current structure of the websites and
tweak it some as some resources are really hard to find. Simple things
like adding a top level menu for the wiki most projects have something
like a documentation tab that points to a predefined wiki page with
instructions and links to other parts of the wiki covering important
topics.. Adding a simple URL like
wiki.ovirt.org that redirects to
www.ovirt.org/wiki . There have been other idea's tossed out in the list
many of them are good ideas and simple to do but unless someone really
pushes them they tend to go no where. Maybe an official suggesting list
Editable by all and a todo list (editable by just infra team member) to
help capture those idea's
agree.
I believe Dave Neary started looking at this.
Dave?
6) As we see more people testing out the software we are going to get
the same set of questions over and over again. Lets face it how many
times has someone emailed users about nfs storage problems. For all
projects there is always certain questions that get asked a lot. Example
getting NFS working. We really need to find a way to help people get
answers before they start emailing the user list. The requirements are
always hard to get right. We need to find something that the developers
are willing to use well still keeping it simple enough that users wont
just bypass or never check.
or add more robust/defensive code around these places to give proper
error messages.
(not we had these for NFS in the past, but they were too hard to
maintain as their semantics were hard to keep 100% correct over time).
but maybe a side utility to check this may help, or showing the link to
the relevant troubleshooting wiki in the error message.
7) We all know visualization is the future and people are likely going
to take ovirt engine and vdsm in interesting new ways. we already see
changing in the networking stack, glusterfs addon, major improvements in
the UI. There also seems to be a solid todo list that Red Hat is
funding. With all these great changes coming down the pike we are going
to have to handle more and more complex build structure. This one kinda
ties in with #2. We need the ability to spin up other build environments
then just Fedora latest and RHEV that means we are going to have to
bring in people who know Debian, Ubuntu, Gentoo, etc.
looking forward to that.
8) Look at ways to help members write blogs posts about ovirt and
providing a way for people to find them. Blog posts are great ways to
work on new section of the documentation and/or get publicity for a new
feature. My first ovirt build wasn't based on the wiki but a getting
started blog post by Jason Brooks. There are always great topic idea out
there. Off the top of my head I can think of several topics. These
include things like how to use the glusterfs with oVirt, processor types
and how to get the most out of clusters, Exporting a VM, Importing from
VMware, Importing from Xen. Those are just topics off the top of my head
I am sure there are many more. Personally I have never been a fan of
planet.xxx sites but I personally have found using a wordpress mu and
allowing people to post and let the good stuff float to the top of the
sites really does well. Granted we are not going to see a hundred
articles a day but a place for people to post might make it easier for
people to write blog posts and for other people to find them.
Dave?
Well I fell like I am writing a book here and even with that I am sure
there are things I have missed.
I want to make it clear I am not saying anything bad about the team and
what has been done already I am just point out things that I fell this
team should be working on to make the infrastructure behind this great
project help the project not hinder it.
again - your feedback is most welcome,
thanks,
Itamar