[Twisted-Python] Sysadmin seeking projects

[Glyph]

> On Apr 5, 2016, at 3:24 PM, Mike Burns <michael at mirwin.net> wrote:
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> tl;dr sysadmin wants to help Twisted. How do?

HOORAY!

> I've been lurking on this list (and irc) for a while with the intention of lending a hand with some of the infrastructure tasks Glyph has flaunted in some offline chats we've had. For context, I'm a DevOp at Rackspace and have been around the FOSS world for a number of years starting back at university (go Beavs!). After hearing some of Glyph's sysadmin war stories, I thought I could lend a hand.

> So far, I've landed a (very small) Braid documentation fix and gotten a dev environment setup, but the real question is what the Twisted community (and, in turn, Twisted admins) would most benefit from fixing and what order things should be approached in?
> 
> There are a couple different pages I've come across that collect sysadmin-sounding tasks[0][1] but they aren't really prioritized for newcomers to adopt and work on. Are there infra/systems projects available that I can help with? Where should I start?

I really, really hope other people will respond, but I have 3 requests, roughly in order of preference:

Create a clearly-documented single point of entry to Twisted administrative tasks.

Right now, _I_ don't even know how to test changes to our infrastructure.  For example, I wanted to review this PR, to make a change to Trac: <https://github.com/twisted-infra/braid/pull/155>.  So, I asked how to do that.  There's a comment, <https://github.com/twisted-infra/braid/pull/155#issuecomment-161195289>, which links to another comment on another PR, <https://github.com/twisted-infra/braid/pull/111#issuecomment-138052006>, which tells me to run 'vagrant up' and then a bunch of 'fab' commands.  I commented a few times there, explaining that the instructions didn't work, and some details about how they didn't work, but nobody replied.  If you can figure this out and write some instructions that are actually part of the repo and clearly called out, that would be great.  If you've already done some work on the Braid documentation this seems like a natural next step.

Thought leadership!

By now, this should be painfully clear: we have no idea what we are doing.  As an experienced DevOp, you might be able to point to some things we could do that would remove some of the pain we are currently experiencing.

Github.

https://github.com/twisted-infra/braid/pull/179 contains a truly unfortunate number of changes, which need to be pulled apart into comprehensible individual steps so we can deploy them.

There's also the fact that we really want a more robust authentication backend (first, to get our passwords out of a text-file on the filesystem, to enable form-based authentication, and finally, to just start using oauth via github or something).  I could use some help on the email side of things, too, but that's a clearly lower priority than any of this stuff, in terms of a new contributor helping out.  Also, ultimately, I'd really like to move everything we're hosting to more powerful infrastructure, which we have a non-trivial amount of, for free, if we could only get our act together to use it.

That first item is by far the most important though, because right now there is a culture of fear among our (extremely small) operations community.  Nobody knows exactly how everything works, and the only reward for hours and hours of super annoying volunteer work is "development doesn't grind to a crushing halt".  If we had a reliable, easy-to-set-up staging environment, then we could maybe actually accept fun stuff as part of our operational footprint - "host some cool demos of Twisted code somewhere on twistedmatrix.com" is permanently on my to-do list and I can never really do anything about it.  Once we get to that point, it'll be possible to motivate more external contributors to do stuff, and we can maybe reverse the death-spiral of nobody wanting to touch this infrastructure.

-glyph

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