[Board] Travis-CI & OSGeo

[Regina Obe]

Howard,

Very well stated. Yes that's what is in the back of my mind too.  I'm willing to put in quite a bit of time, but I don't want it to be a heroic one off thing that is not sustainable like you said as that would quickly lead to burn-out.

So yes we do need to come up with a way to make this sustainable and not be a heroic effort.  I'm not convinced that we can't have people take part ownership of this and feel a part of it or get people contributing for funding of a maintainer.  Seems to work pretty well for the PostgreSQL group and that's pretty much all volunteers.

I would first of all not start with hey everybody lets jump in and do this.  I would start off with folks where travis is not sufficient enough and eat the apple one bite at a time slowly getting people on board who have expressed interest not only in using but contributing to the workload and understanding the tool.

Like I said to me it's not a this or that. You can have both.  Travis is great for testing pull requests, and various gc etc.  When I need to control more I look to something like Jenkins or buildbot, but I still value what travis offers and wouldn't throw it out the window. 

10 years was a long time ago. History repeats itself every 10 years with a slight twist. 
I was pretty impressed with what you guys had done.  I'd like to try it again, but this time avoiding the "Burn-out" cliff. 

Thanks,
Regina









-----Original Message-----
From: Howard Butler [mailto:howard at hobu.co] 
Sent: Tuesday, May 01, 2018 1:22 PM
To: Regina Obe <lr at pcorp.us>; 'María Arias de Reyna' <delawen at gmail.com>
Cc: 'OSGeo-Board' <board at lists.osgeo.org>; 'Sandro Santilli' <strk at kbt.io>
Subject: Re: [Board] Travis-CI & OSGeo



On 5/1/18 2:39 AM, Regina Obe wrote:
> I'm sure Hobu will correct my ignorance and rave about all the 
> goodness of Travis :)
My point(s) about Travis are not about its technical non-superiority.
Ten years ago, Mateusz Loskot and I built and maintained an OSGeo buildbot instance farm to do the same thing as you're proposing with Jenkins. It's not about which approach is technically better. It's the fact that buildbot required Mateusz and I to never burn out. We did.
Because we burned out, the projects could not depend on us or the infrastructure we provided. It rotted and fell down.

Paying for Travis vs. building our own is about sustainability, not technical prowess. *Travis never burns out* because we would be paying for it. If it goes out of business, we can find another (Circle,
whatever) to pay for. Should OSGeo pay you so you never burn out (you would anyway, suffering people's build farms is a thankless task)? Or should it pay for specialists who only run build farms for many more organizations and users than OSGeo's?

Projects that depend upon unstable infrastructure are unstable.
Infrastructure that is built, maintained, operated, and supported by volunteer effort is more unstable than commercially supported infrastructure when the volunteer pool is very small and sensitive to heroes and burnout.

Howard