Re: [gentoo-project] Gentoo, GitHub, and the Social Contract

["Robin H. Johnson" <robbat2@gentoo.org>]

On Sun, Feb 15, 2015 at 07:04:54AM +0100, Michał Górny wrote:
> Dnia 2015-02-14, o godz. 21:48:22
> "Andreas K. Huettel" <dilfridge@gentoo.org> napisał(a):
> 
> > whenever the suggestion comes up to enable contributions to Gentoo via Github 
> > pull requests, we also encounter discussion of the Gentoo Social Contract.
> > 
> > The two points that are seen as conflicting are
> > 
> > * The software running Github is closed source, proprietary.
> > 
> > * The Gentoo Social Contract states [1]:
> > "Gentoo will never depend upon a piece of software or metadata unless it 
> > conforms to the GNU General Public License, the GNU Lesser General Public 
> > License, the Creative Commons - Attribution/Share Alike or some other license 
> > approved by the Open Source Initiative (OSI)."
> Maybe you should start by providing an alternative conforming to this.
> For a start, Infra should stop running proprietary software. However,
> so far they have been openly refusing to publish their scripts.
> In fact, I've been recently asked to put my open source overlay QA
> scripts [1] in a restricted-access repository.
The only reason most Infra scripts AREN'T directly public, is that they
are in the long-standing cfengine/puppet repos, and those repos contain
scatterings of passwords. Next week, the cfengine history will be a full
decade old (Earliest commit is 2005/02/22).

Using Wikimedia (who run Wikipedia) as an example, go and read this:
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/09/19/ever-wondered-how-the-wikimedia-servers-are-configured/

It took WikiMedia a few weeks of fulltime work multiple by several
people, to get the stuff into a state with split public/private repos.

Infra would love to have our stuff more open, but as it stands, there is
a LOT of historical password junk in the scripts. 

If you look at recent package additions, you'll see I added
dev-ruby/hiera-eyaml-gpg, to extract more of the passwords out of the
core Puppet tree. For passwords beyond puppet, look at
https://github.com/robbat2/pwstore, not presently packaged because I'm
waiting for a response from upstream to see about how it diverged.

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. I've
been doing that for my dayjob already:
https://github.com/BCLibCoop/?query=puppet 
And I'm borrowing where possible in both directions: both for work from
Gentoo infra, and for Gentoo from my work stuff.

At the present rate it's going, it's mostly:
- new services are built in puppet
- old services are deprecated and removed from cfengine

Nothing that infra runs explicitly depends on GitHub.

-- 
Robin Hugh Johnson
Gentoo Linux: Developer, Infrastructure Lead
E-Mail     : robbat2@gentoo.org
GnuPG FP   : 11ACBA4F 4778E3F6 E4EDF38E B27B944E 34884E85