On Wed, Feb 18, 2015 at 5:47 AM, Robin H. Johnson wrote: > On Tue, Feb 17, 2015 at 07:10:53AM -0500, Rich Freeman wrote: > > On Tue, Feb 17, 2015 at 4:01 AM, Robin H. Johnson > wrote: > > > > > > If I could afford to spend the more than just volunteer time on Infra, > > > yes, I'd love to have few full 40 hour weeks to put into cleaning up > our > > > cfengine and puppet to where it's significantly easier to manage. > > > > The one thing I was trying to avoid doing was giving an impression > > that the infra team isn't busy doing work that helps everybody around > > here. > > > > You summarize the problem well here. You're too busy due to a labor > > shortage to do the sorts of things that would help reduce the labor > > shortage. > Of infra staff, in 2014 antarus left infra, and we gained dastergon > prometheanfire redlizard. bonsaikitten turned us down again, as he's > busy running the gentooexperimental infrastructure. > > > I don't mean to trivialize the problem, either. Gentoo has a lot of > > donated infrastructure, and a decent amount of cash when you're > > talking about replacing hard drives and such. The problem is that we > > really don't have the kind of money it would take to take on even a > > single employee. > I've wondered in the past, about doing a Kickstarter/IndieGogo to pay me > for spending a month or two on Gentoo, based on the model of the very > successful Django kickstarter: > > https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/andrewgodwin/schema-migrations-for-django > (there have been other open source kickstarters since then, but the > Django one was one of the first that delivered just open source > software). > > If I wanted to do it full-time, for the cost of living (with my wife and > 10 month old daughter) in Vancouver, at a bare minimum, I need it to be > at least $6000CAD/month before taxes. > > Potential major projects for it, in a rough priority order: > - Get rid of cfengine > - Migration of services off some of our oldest servers > - Split-model Puppet (like Wikimedia) > - Projects Hosting (mostly repurposing 'kup', but needs some dev work) > - Split mail & dev.g.o > - eu.dev.g.o box (post-split of mail) > - Official Gentoo cloud images, from releng (because they'd make infra's > life easier too). > - List Archives > - Website revamp > > Stuff that is NOT on the table (and why) > - Git migration > - We're actually just blocked on a specific new sponsor for more than > month now, they bought a nice new box, and they have to fix > something in their network. > > This also needs to have a self-sustaining result, not an expectation > that it will be repeated in future. > > -- > Robin Hugh Johnson > Gentoo Linux: Developer, Infrastructure Lead > E-Mail : robbat2@gentoo.org > GnuPG FP : 11ACBA4F 4778E3F6 E4EDF38E B27B944E 34884E85 > > A Kickstarter/IndieGogo fund-raising campaign would be great for these kind of time-consuming efforts. I had asked in trustees' IRC channel about that topic last August and they replied that there isn't any issue on running such campaigns with a specific objective. Although a remote full-time job is ideal and irreplaceable, an alternative solution would be a Sprint like Debian DSA team[1] and KDE[2] did in the past. More specifically, KDE ran successfully fund-raiser campaigns for Randa Meetings in 2012[3] and 2014[4]. In addition, instead of increasing expenses for booking a place to organize the Sprint, a company could provide a room to hold the sprint, like SUSE did to KDE Plasma developers[5]. Of course the alternative option needs more planning since the infra team is distributed around the world and most of the members have already a full-time jobs and obligations. However, since a Sprint was discussed in the Gentoo Dinner in FOSDEM I wanted to mention it as an alternative solution for potential organization in the future. [1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2013/06/msg00164.html [2] https://sprints.kde.org/sprint/all [3] https://pledgie.com/campaigns/18045 [4] https://www.kde.org/fundraisers/randameetings2014/ [5] https://news.opensuse.org/2010/02/11/meet-the-kde-plasma-developers-at-suse-feb-22/ Best regards, Pavlos Ratis