Key Ubuntu teams should have an open process for new members
Steve Langasek
steve.langasek at ubuntu.com
Wed Jun 14 18:51:18 UTC 2023
I am largely aligned with Robie on this.
Having publicly documented processes might answer some questions that people
interested in joining the teams might have; but it would not substantially
change the outcomes regarding the size of the teams, the rate at which we
add members, etc.
Seb and I have repeatedly discussed the state of the Ubuntu Release Team and
I strongly disagree with his analysis.
First, when there have only been 3 members added to the Release Team over
the past 6 years, I think it's stretching to read any pattern into who has
been added.
Second, the current nature of the Release Team's responsibilities means that
it takes a full 6 months (if all goes well) to mentor someone into the team,
and this needs to be serialized because there are only enough tasks to give
candidates to do one per cycle!
Seb has put himself forward as a candidate for the Release Team on behalf of
the Desktop Team, and I welcome this. We just have to get our current
candidates through the queue (Utkarsh, CPC; Paride, QA) before we can
actually start the process of onboarding him.
I *do* agree that the Release Team is understaffed; the Release Team members
are in broad agreement about this. When Adam was still around and Iain was
still active, we were in stable territory but definitely lacking in
redundancy. With their absence, we have recognized that we were under
water, but this is something that takes time to correct.
As we've gone through the process of onboarding new members over the past
year, Łukasz has started to write up criteria for Release Team membership.
I think this would be appropriate to publish at some point. I defer to
Łukasz on the timeline for this, as he doesn't appear to have been
comfortable with the draft in its current state even to share it with our
current candidates.
Regarding the Archive Admin team:
> 'So the Archive Admin team, similarly to the Ubuntu SRU and Ubuntu
> Release teams, is a strict invite-only team with no formal process of
> becoming one. The main reason is that being an AA gives a lot of power
> in Ubuntu, basically giving full control over the Ubuntu archive
> as-is, so it's not something anyone can get by just requesting
> membership. This is also why there is no formal process as we do not
> want it to be possible for arbitrary people to apply by themselves.'
I don't agree with the last part of this. We do, in fact, have "arbitrary
people" putting themselves forward for the team; having our policy publicly
documented would possibly reduce the number of such applications.
OTOH, it is not a priority for me to write up such documentation of our
policy. As Seb is also an admin of ~ubuntu-archive, and is interested in
this topic, I would welcome him driving such documentation if he believes
it's important.
Regarding the specific case of Dimitri applying for the Archive Team, which
Alex mentions - Dimitri brought forward a specific problem, that there is a
lack of redundancy in terms of who can drive the kernel SRU process from an
AA perspective, but bundled it with a specific solution - that he personally
be added to the AA team. This is not an acceptable reason to be added to
the AA team. What actually needs to happen is that Andy Whitcroft needs to
train existing AA team members on the kernel SRU process - we don't lack
capacity in the team to do this, we only lack the training. I believe some
of this training did happen in Prague during the engineering sprint (Łukasz,
Chris Halse Rogers?), though unfortunately I was unable to participate due
to scheduling conflicts.
Responding to a couple other specific comments:
> rs2009: am interested in joining the release team, but wasn't sure how to
> apply
rs2009's experience in Ubuntu development is at this point brief, and he is
not a core dev. I would not entertain him as a candidate for joining the
Release Team at this time. Having a published policy for membership in the
Release Team would not likely have prevented this question, because the
problem with such policies is that they are not discoverable in any obvious
fashion - so he almost certainly would've had to have a conversation with a
release team member about this in any case.
> https://irclogs.ubuntu.com/2022/10/17/%23ubuntu-devel.html
> pitti: what's up with SRUs? looks like the jammy queue hasn't been processed
> since mid-August?
There is a public KPI that tracks the size of our SRU queues:
https://ubuntu-release.kpi.ubuntu.com/d/yIC34LpGk/ubuntu-metrics?viewPanel=6&orgId=1&from=now-1y&to=now
This shows that the perception that the queue had not been processed between
mid-August and October was simply false. Looking at the age of the oldest
package in the queue does not tell you anything about whether the queue is
being worked, because sometimes there are difficult/unclear cases that are
left in the queue (rather than being rejected) for some time. E.g. at the
time this discussion started in private, I had done a full pass of the
lunar,kinetic,jammy SRU queues the previous Friday, but the oldest package
in the queue at that time was 46 weeks old. (I also, looking at the queue
in direct response to this thread, went ahead and rejected some of these
older packages that were not making forward progress; but the oldest package
in the queue is now 50 weeks old.) We could discuss whether the SRU team's
current handling of such cases is adequate; but it's definitely not a
resourcing question IMHO.
--
Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer https://www.debian.org/
slangasek at ubuntu.com vorlon at debian.org
On Tue, Jun 13, 2023 at 07:11:15PM +0200, Sebastien Bacher wrote:
> (for context that's an email I sent the techboard before I joined the board,
> the discussion picked up recently and TB members agreed that we should have
> it on the mailing list)
>
> Dear Technical Board,
>
> I would like to bring that topic for consideration. I believe that the lack
> of open application process for core Ubuntu teams (Archive Admin, Release
> Team, SRU team) is hurting the project and has lead to an ongoing
> under-staffing of those groups.
>
> I'm unsure how to best approach the topic so I'm going to list a few
> examples of situations I've witnessed or experienced and found problematic.
>
> 1. Could be an obvious one but the Archive and SRU teams don't have defined
> contact points, which makes quite difficult for anyone to engage with them.
> You can't try to IRC ping and hope someone reply but it is not great
>
> 2. Laney's application to become Archive Admin
>
> The core teams members are usually quite busy people. That's a topic that
> is coming on regular basis as people try to restore some sort of
> on-duty-rotation for the members, which has not had much success in recent
> years.
>
> Iain proposed to join the ~ubuntu-archive team to help in early 2020. We had
> a in person discussion with several of the archive admins in Frankfurt in
> March at a Canonical event where everyone agreed that Iain is trusted and
> should be added, yet we couldn't move to the next step since there is no
> documented process to follow. Since we were a bit lost on how to get that
> moving I sent a group email end of June asking us to vote on adding Iain
> hoping it would unblock the situation. We got most people replying with a +1
> position, then Steve replied by requesting that Iain got trained with an
> existing archive admin on specific tasks before being added. He also added
> that
>
> 'Regarding process: the de facto process up to now has been that you
> convince one of the administrators of the ~ubuntu-archive team, and you're
> in.'
>
> 3. Christian Ehrhardt applied to join the Archive team as well this year, he
> started by emailing me/a few others with an emailed titled 'What does it
> take to become an Archive-Admin?'
>
> which included those questions
>
> 'That made me wonder what exactly it would take to become an ArchiveAdmin
> myself.
> There are plenty of docs about how to become a CoreDev or any of the
> lower tier upload permissions. But the ArchiveAdmin role seems to be
> freestyle - at least from what I can tell from the Wiki.
>
> Thereby I was wondering - and hereby asking you - about:
> - Are there things considered a strict requirement or qualification to
> become an AA?
> - Is there a formal process to become an Archive Admin?
> - Are there regular rotations on AA-tasks like NBS, New queue, ...?
> - if so how much time per week is expected/required?'
>
> To which he got as a reply
>
> 'So the Archive Admin team, similarly to the Ubuntu SRU and Ubuntu
> Release teams, is a strict invite-only team with no formal process of
> becoming one. The main reason is that being an AA gives a lot of power
> in Ubuntu, basically giving full control over the Ubuntu archive
> as-is, so it's not something anyone can get by just requesting
> membership. This is also why there is no formal process as we do not
> want it to be possible for arbitrary people to apply by themselves.'
>
>
> That's not the first time I hear that position and I don't believe the claim
> to be true. I don't see how having an open process would lower the bar? The
> same people would take the decision of who is getting added. The application
> could go through a private list if needed. I also don't believe that we
> would have such a flow of low qualified applicants.
>
> 4. Those teams are understaffed and it is problematic for the project.
>
> Random recent quotes from IRC
>
> https://irclogs.ubuntu.com/2022/10/06/%23ubuntu-release.html#t09:28
> GunnarHj The kinetic unapproved queue is longer than I would have
> expected a week before Final Freeze. Specifically gnome-user-docs is a
> concern of mine, but there are quite a few others. Is there a plan to attend
> to the queue soon? 09:28
> xnox GunnarHj: i think a few release team people are out.
> ...
> Eickmeyer[m]ginggs: I'm confused too. AIUI, the release team (partially
> meaning you) is supposed to be processing the unapproved queue this time of
> the release cycle. It hasn't budged all week.
> ...
> rs2009: am interested in joining the release team, but wasn't sure how to
> apply
>
> https://irclogs.ubuntu.com/2022/10/17/%23ubuntu-devel.html
> pitti: what's up with SRUs? looks like the jammy queue hasn't been processed
> since mid-August?
>
>
> 5. Another anecdotal fact, https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-release/+members
> shows only 3 members added in the last 6 years and they are all coming from
> the Canonical Foundation team.
>
> I've been told one new member is being onboarded which isn't from
> Foundations (but from another Canonical team) but I don't think that change
> the picture and it does look like people wanting their group to be the only
> ones to have control and reflect bad on the project (unless you believe we
> don't have members outside of Canonical-foundations that would be suited for
> the job or wanting to do it, which I don't think is true)
>
>
> I've been talking to members of those teams and their admin over the years
> and I don't believe they are interested in seeing more openness in the
> process which I why I'm bringing the topic to the TB at this point. I'm
> happy to provide more examples or to discuss the situation directly with TB
> members if needed.
>
> Also as a disclosure, I find the lack of manpower and the review delays from
> those teams problematic and I tried to proposed my help to the SRU team
> several times in the past in private conversation with current members who
> seemed to be open to the idea to never hear back. We also tried to get
> someone from ~ubuntu-desktop added to the release group after Laney left
> Canonical and had less time to contribute to hit a similar walls.
>
> I'm busy enough and already member of other key teams and I might not been
> the right applicant for those but I would have like to at least have someone
> tell me that because at this point I still don't know if the idea of having
> me helping got rejected or not considered? And if it was not if that's
> because of the lack of process which means we just end up in a situation
> where those teams don't even realize that the project has some members that
> would be wanted to help?
>
> I've also to admit the situation has made me wonder a few times in the
> recent cycles if I should reconsider my involvement in the project
>
> Thanks for reading,
> Sebastien Bacher
>
>
>
>
> --
> technical-board mailing list
> technical-board at lists.ubuntu.com
> https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/technical-board
--
Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer https://www.debian.org/
slangasek at ubuntu.com vorlon at debian.org
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