[OpenLayers-Dev] bus number (regarding infrastructure)

[Christopher Schmidt]

On Thu, Mar 05, 2009 at 03:21:48PM -0700, Tim Schaub wrote:
> Hey-
> 
> MetaCarta graciously hosts our project infrastructure.
> 
> Chris handles all (or nearly all) admin work.  I assume this is all in 
> his free time.

The OpenLayers server maintenance -- that is, maintaining the website
itself -- is supported by MetaCarta, but almost all other work is done
in my 'free time'. (So, mostly right, but if the website dies, I get a
phone call, even if I am on vacation. :))

> Erik has taken responsibility for accepting license agreements and trac 
> account requests.  I assume he manually adds people to an htpasswd file 
> when doing the latter.  I suggested the AccountManager plugin to remove 
> the manual step - but I'm not sure exactly how permissions are handled 
> (for sandbox or core contributions).
> 
> With Erik's departure, we reduce our bus number by one - with respect to 
> the number of people with access to our project infrastructure.
> 
> I'd like to hear discussion again on the following:
> 1) Giving access to non-MetaCarta employees for the current servers.

This one can't really happen with our current setup.

> 2) Moving to OSGeo infrastructure.

This is the one I'd prefer. I'm glad to do it if someone else volunteers
a weekend of time to help. It will probably require at least some prep
work, and an acceptance of the community of downtime during the
transition. (My biggest reason for not transitioning yet is becasue i
think there will be a period of hours/days/possibly a week during which
we work out kinks, and I get enough abuse as is on the project that I
don't want to invite more on my own.)

If someone else is interested, the best thing to do is to:
 * Speak up here
 * Help concoct a plan
 * Join the SAC committee list on the osgeo servers, and start
   discussing it

Over the past year, I have worked out most of the technical kinks to the
OSGeo infrastructure with regard to OSGeo in prep for us moving thee, so
at this point, it's just accepting the downtime and moving forward.

I would propose that we wait to have this downtime until *after* 2.8.
Currently, our milestone needs to have 4 tickets a day closed or moved
in order to get us to a release on time, and migrating to OSGeo takes
away valuable time towards that goal.

 
> I guess my motivation boils down to this: if Chris ever decides to take 
> a real vacation, nobody can do squat to manage the infrastructure (for 
> practical purposes).

Agreed. This has been weighing on my mind, and motivated the change to
the account admin changes.

Note that technically, John Frank also has access to the servers, and
the documentation for managing them is mostly in the wiki, but I agree
that this is only a last-defense; informative in case I *actually* 
get hit by a bus before we move to OSGeo, but I completely 
agree we should move to OSGeo long term.   

Regards,
-- 
Christopher Schmidt
MetaCarta