oVirt.org Access Needed

[R P Herrold]

On Thu, 23 Jan 2014, Brian Proffitt wrote:

> Thanks to all for the assist. Rich just sent me the how to, 
> and apparently, I need to ssh into the actual server to pull 
> the git repo of Bitergia's data into the web server, set up 
> the alias in the conf file, and add a cron job to pull the 
> git data down daily.

Could you please forward those instructions into the infra ML, 
so the list members can see how it was set up?

and so to some questions for clarification: Is 'bitergia' and 
its sub-parts packaged into a form that has landed in Fedora, 
or ... where ?  I found the demo instance pointed to to be 
very sluggish and loady on my local browser, but did not run 
down why yet with a local install

I spent some time looking for a way to retrieve the sources to 
do a local setup, and was not able to find them.  Are they 
under a FOSS license?  

Is that linked instance pulling real time stats from live 
servers or from cached details?  If the former, infra probably 
need to get an understanding as to the load effects, as the 
ovirt infrastructure lacks spare capacity in terms of memory, 
and in some cases in terms of network bandwidth.  No surprises 
there as it has been reported in infra meetings, and in the 
Wednesday 'sync' but ...
 
> So, is that do-able? Or would it be easier for someone on 
> the team to set this up?

'do-able' and 'done right' probably are different here.  The 
demo instance shows it _can_ be done, but ...

/me looks for a soapbox and puts on an infra 'hat':

	unpackaged tools are 'magical'  magical is a problem

Unpackaged tools are un-vetted in a traceable manner as to 
License.  Unpackaged tools in a remote VCS can simply 
disappear, be invisibly compromised, or go through an API 
change, or otherwise become NON re-deployable in the future.  
A start-up vendor can close its doors and disappear, re-license, 
take down archives, ... .  Entropy happens all the time

The discipline of packaging prevents many of these problems 
from gaining a toe-hold, by forcing retrieval of a version,  
which may be checked against published md5sums (sha, 
whatever); gets a review (by human eyes); and gets replication 
of the build process by a non-human auto-builder.  If there is 
a good 'make test', it also has a sample set of configs to 
read and confirm function of ...

Ones which ** require ** a manual [woops -- magical ;) ] 
content deployment from git from instructions conveyed in a 
non-public channel (or: unrolling a tarball, running some tool 
which untraceably solves dependencies, such as 'cpan' or 'npm' 
to get a point in time image which may be broken tomorrow when 
one goes to re-deploy it) are broken.  

It may be pulling in encumbered matter (eg: a patent problem 
like the old: 'gif', or 'rar'). An undocumented manual 
configuration / setup process is inherently fragile

New non-packaged matter needs explain the path it will follow 
to move to being packaged.  In the interim, it needs the rigor 
of being documented software 'engineering'.  One road to that 
documentation of process is for it to be done via a VCS 
checking, and a puppet CO in deployment, just like management 
of configurations, and re-doable and relocatable via puppet

Also, I do not find that this 'bitergia' facility has a 
tracking bug asking that it be installed [1] [2]

If there is an urgency to attain it, today is the first it has 
been mentioned publicly

The approach of 'undocumented' except via back channel 
communication (digging through IRC logs, digging through email 
archives, whatever) is a broken one.  The result can turn into 
a subject to a single point of outage when the manual maker of 
the tool is off line or unavailable otherwise


Turning to process for 'infra', it seems to me a person 
proposing something should be able to point to a solution 
which has it 'solved' in demonstration with a puppet recipe 
that is checked into a testing branch of the infra git, which 
recipes handle building that a testing instance, and then 
managing its configuration (and so, when re-pointed to 'live', 
takes it live)

-- Russ herrold

[1] https://fedorahosted.org/ovirt/report/1?page=1&asc=0&sort=created
[2] 
http://bitergia.com/projects/redhat-ovirt-dashboard/browser/