About this document

This document lays out a problem statement, requirements, and constraints according to the Open Decision Framework. The aim is to arrive at a transparent decision about the future of a git forge for the communities that represent the platforms that the Community Platform Engineering (CPE) team manages. Those communities are the CentOS and Fedora platforms and also include the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) platform from a tooling and integration perspective. This document is the first in a series of documents capturing the conversation about the problems we face and driving the conversation to implement the decisions captured.

Problem

The problem statement for this ODF can be broken down into a number of disctinct problems. They are listed in no particular order or priority:

CPE Mission Statement

The Community Platform Engineering (CPE) team have a mission statement to support the infrastructure and services that build and deliver platform artifacts. The mission statement aims to focus the team’s work from overcommitting to work, running multiple projects in a disconnected manner and to ultimately provide focus and value for our Communities. The remit of the team needed to be defined to allow the team to both manage the workload and the expectations.
Using this definition, the current git forge, Pagure, does not align with what CPE can focus on from both a roadmap development perspective and the operational requirements that such a service demands long term. While Pagure was historically driven by the CPE team, developing a gitforge is outside of building and delivering platform artifacts. [See the later sections for more focus on this.] A self-hosted and self-developed git forge is not required to build and deliver platform artifacts.
While we can make exceptions to the mission statement, we first need to know why we should consider a specific exception. This helps justify the inclusion and subsequent prioritisation of work. We recognise that Pagure is deeply integrated into our daily workflows and is used extensively by the Community. This is the reason the CPE team has not re-examined this commitment, and is a primary driver to openly discuss the team’s and community’s requirements for a git forge.

Development work on Pagure

The CPE team has been unable to commit a development team to Pagure for several months now. This situation is unlikely to change based on our current known priorities.
Historically, Pagure was maintained by individuals (including members of the Fedora community who aren’t on the CPE team) where spare cycles allowed. However, CPE’s mode of working is now that of feature teams, removing the siloed contributions in favour of building sustainable team practices. The feature roadmap for Pagure, however, cannot be executed solely by the CPE team, since the feature requests need to be weighed against the team’s other priorities.
Pagure represents one app out of our current ownership of 100+ code bases. Therefore progression of the roadmap is not guaranteed and certainly not at the pace seen previously. Similarly, bug fixes and enhancements are currently on a best-effort basis. The code is therefore frozen from a functionality perspective pending the outcome of this ODF.

Operational considerations of Pagure

Every line of code and application CPE supports as a team has a cost burden for maintenance and uptime. Pagure is highly-connected to numerous services that are critical to successfully running services that CPE and the community need and support. Therefore, the team must look at long term maintenance including bug fixes and server maintenance as requirements.

At the same time, integrations that already exist in Pagure may need to be created for another git forge, which is a cost as well. This also needs to be fully considered by the team as part of the requirement gathering.

Another major consideration to operationally own an application is its performance and scalability. A git forge may have key requirements for uptime, availability and responsiveness for end users. The current scalability profile of Pagure is unlikely to substantially change as it is resourced today – while the consumption profile of the user base and interconnected applications is likely to increase.

History of gathering requirements

TThe original purpose of Pagure was to mirror the functionality of popular git forge solutions that were available at the time (when most were nascent). Pagure’s feature enhancements were driven by community needs and the team’s viewpoint of where a git forge should go. The team has not solicited requirements in a holistic way from its users and the community, and its internal customers have mainly consisted of the team itself.

However, we also recognize that the feature gap between Pagure and some other forges is substantial and growing. Without either a dedicated development team, or stealing resources from other priority initiatives, it will be almost impossible to close those gaps. Depending on the consumers’ requirements, we recognize this could put Pagure in an untenable situation versus other solutions.

This makes gathering a full set of requirements even more critical. If we fail to capture requirements completely, this discussion is very likely to happen again, only more urgently and with less time for the team to plan and react.

Problems we’re not trying to solve

Feature gap between various git forge solutions

This conversation does not focus on whether Feature X exists in Forge Y or Forge Z. Instead it focuses on functional and non functional requirements for a git forge in general.

CPE time and resourcing investment

This conversation does not focus on how the CPE team invest their time and limited resources. That is not a factor in this discussion.

CPE Mission Statement

This document does not focus on the CPE Mission Statement or whether a git forge should fit that Mission Statement.

Who is making the decision?

The decision will be made by the management of the CPE team with careful consideration of the requirements for both the Fedora and CentOS communities as well as the needs of the team. The CPE team is the group that manages the integration of services and tooling with a git forge solution on behalf of our communities, and will choose the most sustainable, functional, and scalable option to improve our workflows long term.

Choices Available

There exist three choices for such a solution. Github, Gitlab and Pagure. There are no other forges that we could find that had both the product maturity and standing in open source communities, therefore no other solutions are under consideration as the three choices here represent the main git forge solutions on the market. The team will use the requirements gathered to make an informed decision on which of the 3 to pursue.

Who has input into the decision?

Please see the section on Stakeholders below.

Objectives

Identify functional requirements of a git forge that end users and stakeholders need

The goal is to outline what is needed from the day to day perspective of:

• Using a git forge solution.
• Maintaining a git forge solution
• Future proofing a git forge solution

Requirements are welcome from members of the CPE team and the groups identified as being impacted by such a decision.

Identify non-functional requirements of a git forge that end users and stakeholders need

Examples of non-functional requirements include but are not limited to performance, scalability, availability, reliability, maintability, and capacity. The goal here is to include considerations of this nature from any group impacted by this decision.

Make an informed decision on the future of our git forge solution

Upon gathering the requirements of a git forge solution, the intention is to:

• Examine requirements gathered versus available git forges
• Examine the cost of each forge from the CPE teams perspective. This cost is not exclusively a monetary amount and includes maintenance and development costs and trade offs versus our teams roadmap

To be clear, the outcome here may be a decision to invest heavily in Pagure to meet the requirements or it may be to opt for another git forge to meet the requirements. No option is off the table.

Who may be impacted

• Package maintainers for Fedora, EPEL, CentOS Linux, and CentOS Stream
• Developers of apps/services for infrastructure that integrate via Pagure
• The CPE team
• Developers (and users) that use Pagure for their upstream source
• Members of the Fedora and CentOS communities who currently use Pagure as a source repository or ticket system

Who are the key stakeholders

While we apprecaited that all individual voices matter, for a more sane approach to gathering requirements we will identify key stakeholders to collate and present a singular view of their representation.

• Fedora Council will represent the individual community members of the Fedora Project
• CentOS Board will represent the individual community members of the CentOS Project
• Paul Frields will represent the RHEL perspective
• Aoife Moloney will roll up the requirements of the CPE team as our Feature Driver.

How will information be gathered and disseminated?

It is recommended that both Fedora Council and CentOS Board gather input and present their concerns in a manner that is consistent with how their communities work. The RHEL and CPE requirements will be gathered through Red Hat communication mechanisms and presented publicly via a HackMD file to ensure transparency in their source. This will be published and distributed in due course. Additionally, a live video call and associated IRC meetings will be held and advertised in advance to discuss the requirements, talk about concerns and address any questions. We want transparency to be at the heart of this decision.

Timeline of Phases

• January 13th 2020 sharing of the ODF for consideration within CPE Team
• January 20th 2020 sharing of the ODF for consideration to Community
• February 10th 2020, closing of comments from stakeholders which marks the end of the Ideation Phase
• CPE Management evaluate the requests and where necessary may instruct the CPE team to begin a Planning and Research phase to take in the inputs from the Ideation Phase
• CPE design, develop and test proof of concept plans based on the decision made by CPE Management and share this with the Community
• CPE closes the ODF with a decision made and a path forward for our git forge

On behalf of the Board, a group of us is working on an update to the CentOS Project goals that were originally laid out in 2014 and are online at centos.org/about. We’re hosting informal user and contributor interviews in a room throughout the day at the CentOS Dojo later this month in Brussels.

Please join us and share your open and honest experiences with CentOS the project, technologies, community, and so forth. We’d like to hear from you and, ultimately, see how your input can inform the goal-setting process and outcome. You are welcome to bring your questions about community, governance, project direction, other strategic thoughts, and so forth.

If you're interested in participating in this informal opinion-gathering, please come see Karsten or Rich at the Dojo, or at the CentOS table at FOSDEM.

/signed Karsten Wade on behalf of CentOS Board and other co-authors

We wanted to update you on what is happening, largely out of sight to most of the community, on the CentOS Linux 8 front. We have appreciated the patience of the community, but we understand that your patience won’t last forever.

A lot of the work in rebuilding RHEL sources into CentOS Linux is handled by automation scripts. Due to the changes between RHEL 7 and RHEL 8, many of these scripts no longer work, and had to be fixed to reflect the new layout of the buildroot. This work has been largely completed, allowing us to pull the source from Red Hat without a lot of manual work. This, in turn, should make the process of rebuilding RHEL 8.2 go much more smoothly than RHEL 8.0 and 8.1 have done.

Once 8.1 has been released, work will begin on bringing this new codebase, along with CentOS Stream, in to CBS (https://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/CommunityBuildSystem) so that SIGs can build packages for CentOS Linux 8 and CentOS Stream.

We will discuss this, and give updates of progress, on the centos-devel mailing list over the coming weeks. Some of you have observed that the CentOS team tends to prioritize doing the work over talking about it. While that’s not all bad, it does tend to leave most of you in the dark as to what it is that is being worked on, and we’re committed to greater transparency going forward.

Once again, we appreciate your patience as we work through the growing pains of the 8 branch. We hope to share a more detailed (projected) timeline in the days to come, with the caveat that timelines always change as they are being worked.

Purpose

To build and distribute the Origin 3.x rpm packages to CentOS repository.

https://wiki.centos.org/SpecialInterestGroup/PaaS

Happy New Year and new endeavors

Happy New Year to all CentOS community!

As of 2020, the CentOS PaaS SIG wants to make a step towards a new endeavor to help and provide OKD 4.x as part of a wider community. However, for the time being we would like to announce that CentOS PaaS SIG charter will only be to mantain the existing Origin 3.x rpm packages published in the CentOS mirrors while we transition to the new OKD Working group (where all the development is taking place as we speak) which will ship the next version of OpenShift community.
As many of you already know, the OpenShift 4.x brought in a lot of innovation and changes in terms of the architecture, deployment and packaging compared with OpenShift 3.x and with that there been some changes with regards to the development relation between OCP/ OKD 4 which was very well covered in [1].
And last but not least, we would like to address the 1 mil $ question: Will there be an OKD 4.x based on CentOS as base OS ?

This topic was very much discussed in the OpenShift Working Group kick off meeting as well as the OpenShift dev mailer and the conclusion (captured in the roadmap [2] ) was:
The initial deliverable of OKD 4.x will be based on Fedora CoreOS as base OS since is the only distribution close to Red Hat CoreOS (rpm-ostree based system driven by Ignition) however should there be any community formed/ willing to develop/ create a CentOS rpm-ostree based system driven by Ignition, the OpenShift Working Group would welcome them (please join the meeting to discuss and maybe create a sub project as mentioned in the cahrter [4] )

Note, the CentOS PaaS SIG doesn't have the expertise in building / creating a new CentOS distribution nor the knowledge of any other initiative in the CentOS community.

We would like to send kudos to all our members who helped us with the SIG activities:

• Daniel Comnea
• Troy Dawson
• Larry Brigman
• Scott Dodson
• Ari LiVigni
• And many others...

To find out more information about the OKD Working Group, please visit [3] where you can find out the charter [4] as well as the approved roadmap for OKD 4.x [2]. Please do get involved [5] and if you find issues please open them in [6] (Bugzilla locations coming soon). You can also contact us on Slack in the #origin-users channel on openshiftcommons.slack.com and #openshift-dev on kubernetes.slack.com.

[1] https://github.com/openshift/okd/issues/26
[2] https://github.com/openshift/community/blob/master/ROADMAP.md
[3] https://github.com/openshift/community
[4] https://github.com/openshift/community/blob/master/CHARTER.md
[5] https://github.com/openshift/community#get-involved
[6] https://github.com/openshift/okd/issues

Dear CentOS enthusiast,

For those of you who celebrate various things at this time of year, we wish you a wonderful time with family and friends.

IN THIS EDITION:

• News
• Releases and updates
• Events
• SIG reports
• Contributing

News

December, as usual, was very slow around here, with many people taking some time off around the end of the year. As such, I don't have much news to report this time.

Red Hat engineering continues to work towards on the tooling necessary to have an active CentOS Stream, and we hope to have an announcement about that this time next month.

Continuing the push for greater transparency and community participation, the Board of Directors has published the minutes from the December board meeting.

Releases and updates

Errata and Enhancements Advisories

We issued the following CEEA (CentOS Errata and Enhancements Advisories) during December:

• Wed Dec 11 2019: CEEA-2019:4155 CentOS 6 microcode_ctl Enhancement - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-December/035578.html
• Tue Dec 24 2019: CEEA-2019:4252 CentOS 6 ca-certificates Enhancement - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-December/035582.html
• Tue Dec 24 2019: CEEA-2019:4161 CentOS 7 microcode_ctl Enhancement - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-December/035586.html

Errata and Security Advisories

We issued the following CESA (CentOS Errata and Security Advisories) during December:

• Tue Dec 3 2019: CESA-2019:3888 Important CentOS 7 ghostscript Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-December/035560.html
• Tue Dec 3 2019: CESA-2019:3981 Important CentOS 7 389-ds-base Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-December/035566.html
• Tue Dec 3 2019: CESA-2019:3976 Low CentOS 7 tcpdump Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-December/035570.html
• Tue Dec 3 2019: CESA-2019:3979 Important CentOS 7 kernel Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-December/035574.html
• Fri Dec 6 2019: CESA-2019:4024 Important CentOS 7 SDL Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-December/035576.html
• Wed Dec 11 2019: CESA-2019:4108 Critical CentOS 6 firefox Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-December/035577.html
• Wed Dec 11 2019: CESA-2019:4152 Important CentOS 6 nss-softokn Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-December/035579.html
• Tue Dec 24 2019: CESA-2019:4205 Important CentOS 6 thunderbird Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-December/035580.html
• Tue Dec 24 2019: CESA-2019:4254 Moderate CentOS 6 freetype Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-December/035581.html
• Tue Dec 24 2019: CESA-2019:4256 Important CentOS 6 kernel Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-December/035585.html
• Tue Dec 24 2019: CESA-2019:4190 Important CentOS 7 nss-util Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-December/035587.html
• Tue Dec 24 2019: CESA-2019:4190 Important CentOS 7 nss-softokn Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-December/035589.html
• Tue Dec 24 2019: CESA-2019:4190 Important CentOS 7 nss Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-December/035590.html
• Tue Dec 24 2019: CESA-2019:4326 Important CentOS 7 fribidi Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-December/035591.html
• Tue Dec 24 2019: CESA-2019:4240 Critical CentOS 7 openslp Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-December/035592.html
• Tue Dec 24 2019: CESA-2019:4148 Important CentOS 7 thunderbird Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-December/035594.html
• Tue Dec 24 2019: CESA-2019:4107 Critical CentOS 7 firefox Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-December/035595.html

Errata and Bugfix Advisories

We issued the following CEBA (CentOS Errata and Bugfix Advisories) during December:

• Tue Dec 3 2019: CEBA-2019:3971 CentOS 7 curl BugFix - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-December/035558.html
• Tue Dec 3 2019: CEBA-2019:3982 CentOS 7 selinux-policy BugFix - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-December/035559.html
• Tue Dec 3 2019: CEBA-2019:3969 CentOS 7 samba BugFix - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-December/035561.html
• Tue Dec 3 2019: CEBA-2019:3975 CentOS 7 libvirt BugFix - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-December/035562.html
• Tue Dec 3 2019: CEBA-2019:3984 CentOS 7 pacemaker BugFix - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-December/035563.html
• Tue Dec 3 2019: CEBA-2019:3974 CentOS 7 mutter BugFix - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-December/035564.html
• Tue Dec 3 2019: CEBA-2019:3972 CentOS 7 sssd BugFix - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-December/035565.html
• Tue Dec 3 2019: CEBA-2019:3983 CentOS 7 util-linux BugFix - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-December/035567.html
• Tue Dec 3 2019: CEBA-2019:3985 CentOS 7 iproute BugFix - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-December/035568.html
• Tue Dec 3 2019: CEBA-2019:3980 CentOS 7 opencryptoki BugFix - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-December/035569.html
• Tue Dec 3 2019: CEBA-2019:3970 CentOS 7 ca-certificates BugFix - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-December/035571.html
• Tue Dec 3 2019: CEBA-2019:3973 CentOS 7 sos BugFix - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-December/035572.html
• Tue Dec 3 2019: CEBA-2019:3977 CentOS 7 numactl BugFix - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-December/035573.html
• Fri Dec 6 2019: CEBA-2019:4106 CentOS 7 kernel BugFix - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-December/035575.html
• Tue Dec 24 2019: CEBA-2019:4251 CentOS 6 net-snmp BugFix - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-December/035583.html
• Tue Dec 24 2019: CEBA-2019:4253 CentOS 6 curl BugFix - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-December/035584.html
• Tue Dec 24 2019: CEBA-2019:4150 CentOS 7 python-requests BugFix - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-December/035588.html
• Tue Dec 24 2019: CEBA-2019:4246 CentOS 7 open-vm-tools BugFix - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-December/035593.html

Other releases

The following releases also happened during December:

• Thu Dec 26 2019: CentOS Linux 8.0.1905 Continuous Release Populated - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-December/035596.html

Events

December was very quiet, as it is in most years. If you represented CentOS at an event in December, please do let us know!

We have published a number of interviews from the Student Cluster Competition at the recent SuperComputing event in Denver:

University of Washington Student Supercomputing

North Carolina State Student Supercomputing

Shangjai Jiao Tong University Student Supercomputing

FOSDEM 2020, and Dojo

In just under a month, we will, as usual, have a table at the annual FOSDEM conference in Brussels, Belgium. This will be held on the first weekend in February, which is the 1st and 2nd of February, 2020. We'll be sharing the space with our friends from Fedora. Please drop by and see us.

And, on the day before FOSDEM starts, we'll be having our annual Dojo at the Marriott Grand Place. That's Friday, January 31st, 2020. The agenda is on the event listing page, and we would love to have you there.

We'll be having a lightning talks section this year, so if you have something you'd like to present about, but don't have enough for a full presentation, bring your notes and your ideas! Tell us about your favorite projects, your interesting discoveries, or your perplexing problem.

Attendance is free, but we would appreciate it if you register, so that we know how many people to plan for. We have limited space, so register soon before we are all full.

See you in Brussels!

Host a Dojo

If your University, company, or research organization, wants to host a CentOS Dojo, we would love to hear from you. You'll need a space where 100-200 people can attend technical talks, and someone who is able to work with us on logistics and talk acquisition. We'll help promote the event, and work with you to craft the schedule of talks. Drop us a note on the CentOS-Promo mailing list - https://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos-promo - with your proposal.

SIG Reports

The SIGs - special interest groups - are where most of the interesting stuff in CentOS happens. They are communities packaging and testing layered projects on top of CentOS, and ensuring that they work reliably.

The PaaS SIG has provided their report as a separate blog post, and the Virtualization and Software Collections SIG reports are provided below.

Virtualization SIG

Purpose

Packaging and maintaining different FOSS based virtualization
applications that one can install and run natively on CentOS.

https://wiki.centos.org/SpecialInterestGroup/Virtualization

Membership Update

We are always looking for new members.

omachace__ joining Virt SIG for oVirt project volunteering for providing
ansible-runner related and mod_wsgi into Virt SIG

Welcoming Miguel Barroso mbarroso to Virt SIG for oVirt

Releases and Packages

oVirt

* upstream released oVirt 4.3.7
* Working on getting oVirt CentOS Stream packages, particularly oVirt 4.4

https://blogs.ovirt.org/2019/09/top-7-things-to-look-forward-to-at-ovirt-conference/
https://blogs.ovirt.org/2019/09/ovirt-and-centos-stream/

Xen

* Xen 4.12.1 available on CentOS 7
* Regular updates to 4.8, 4.10, 4.12 for security updates
* Upstream Xen 4.13 nearing release

Health and Activity

The Virtualization SIG remains fairly healthy. All the projects within
the SIG are updating regularly on biweekly meetings.

oVirt had a conference in Rome on 4 Oct.

oVirt also now has a new driver installer for Windows. If you have a VM
with the old drivers, it is recommended to uninstall them before
installing new ones.

The Xen Developer Summit was held 9-11 July in Chicago.

After an online discussion / survey, it was decided that the "primary
supported" version of Xen would always be the most recent version of
Xen-1. The current "primary" version is 4.8; once Xen 4.13 comes out
upstream (probably next week) we'll move this to 4.12.1. After that,
when 4.14 comes out, we'll update to the latest version of 4.13, and so on.

Issues for the Board

Both Xen and oVirt waiting for CentOS 8 support in the CBS. oVirt using
copr as a work-around for now.

Software Collections SIG

Purpose

The Software Collections SIG will provide an upstream development area for various software collections and related tools. Developers can build on and extend existing SCLs, so they don't need to re-invent the wheel or take responsibility for packaging unnecessary dependencies.

Details at https://wiki.centos.org/SpecialInterestGroup/SCLo

Releases:

• The upstream release of RHSCL 3.4 was rebuilt and made available in the testing repositories since public beta. This release include collections of Nginx 1.16, NodeJS 12, PHP 7.3 and PostgreSQL 12.
  Maven 3.6 was also included upstream, but due to rebuilding and packaging difficulties, it is not available as of this report.

The successfully rebuilt collections are in process of being tested and released, and should be available on public mirrors shortly after this report is published.

Contributing

As with any open source project, there's a lot more than just code. If you want to get involved, but you're not a programmer or packager, there's still a ton of places where you can plug in.

• Design - Graphic and design elements for the product itself, the website, materials for events, and so on, are always a great need. This is true of any open source community, where the focus on code can tend to neglect other aspects.
• Events - While CentOS has an official presence at a few events during the year, we want a wider reach. If you're planning to attend an event, and want to represent CentOS in some way, get in touch with us on the centos-promo mailing list to see how we can support you.
• Promotion - The Promo SIG does a lot in addition to just events. This includes this newsletter, our social media presence, blog posts, and various other things. We need your help to expand this effort.
• Documentation - Any open source project is only as good as its documentation. If people can't use it, it doesn't matter. If you're a writer, you are in great demand.

If any of these things are of interest to you, please come talk to us on the centos-devel mailing list, the centos-promo mailing list, or any of the various social media channels.

We look forward to hearing from you, and helping you figure out where you can fit in.