[Kubuntu Automation] Operation Fir Tree

[José Manuel Santamaría Lema]

Hi,

I have in my technical agenda various "black operations" related to Kubuntu 
Automation for Zesty+1. The first one I would like to complete is "Fir Tree".
https://phabricator.kde.org/w/kubuntu/black-operations/fir-tree/

Why?
Because getting this one will allow me to make future changes in KA without 
interrupting the work of the rest of the team. For instance, I will need to 
rework again the 'kubuntu-retry-builds' script  to share its code with 'ka-
iron-hand' because of:
https://phabricator.kde.org/w/kubuntu/black-operations/iron-hand/
While doing that, I might break that script by accident, so to do that kind of 
work it would be nice to have a stable version of KA which people can use 
without suffering disruptive changes and an unstable version where we would be 
free to add features, rework bad code[1] and test any kind of innovation in 
advance.

However, while we go trough the Operation Fir Tree, we are going to get some 
slightly disruptive changes (don't worry, it's not a big deal). There's no 
other way around this:  with the current KA code, we can't have stable KA 
versions[2] so this is a "chicken and the egg" problem. The good news is that 
once we are done we will - hopefully - enjoy some KA stability.

What is going to change from the user point of view in KA?
1. The way to install Kubuntu Automation
2. The setup we have on the server providing the status pages (I don't have 
access to that server by the way)
(as I said, not a big deal)

That being said, I would like to work with you all on all of this the next 
weekend during the devel meeting if that's possible. I will need your help, 
feedback and cooperation, so thank you in advance.

[1]Keep in mind that most of KA code is not bad because people who worked on 
it did a bad work. It's bad because they code was written in a hurry to get 
the packages released (which is what our users actually use, KA is just an 
internal tooling for us). So they are many things which are cheap solutions 
which should be replaced with better solutions. For instance the ppa-build-
status script is getting the work done, but the code is awful, unnecesarily 
difficult to maintain and ineffcient.

[2]As I already explained some time ago here:
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/kubuntu-devel/2016-November/010941.html