[CentOS-devel] Community Platform Engineering Quarterly ~~Bragging Rights~~ Report Q2 2021

Mon Jul 12 11:18:34 UTC 2021
Aoife Moloney <amoloney at redhat.com>

Hi Everyone,

Below you will find a report of the work the Community Platform
Engineering (CPE) team was involved in over the last three months. If
you would like to view this in a 'toggle-able' view, I would suggest
you visit this hackmd link
https://hackmd.io/@Ap8CkTlpSfmjb44UGV-kWA/BJlrOsBpu

## Intro
The Community Platform Engineering team is a group of people who work
on infrastructure, release engineering, documentation, development and
just about anything else you can think of that supports both the
CentOS and Fedora projects.
In an effort to try work even more effectively and improve on our work
planning, we have been scheduling some of our work on a quarterly
basis for the last 15-18 months. And its been working pretty
well...once we got the hang of it :)
This in a nutshell, just means that there is work the CPE team *will
commit* to delivering every quarter that relates to both distros,
while also still providing support to the projects infrastructure that
come in as bugs, tickets, etc.
Quarter two 2021, or April, May and June to give them their government
names, has been a particularly good quarter for our team with a lot of
work getting completed. Below is a breakdown of what our team
delivered over the quarter per project.
A note, that is a given but should never go without saying - is that
the CPE team work in the Fedora and CentOS communities, and rely on
community member feedback and discussion while working. Without your
continued support and engagement with our team - be it when we are
announcing something available and need input on how it works or an
idea we have had and we want more discussion on a proposal before we
start developing - the work we deliver at the end of each quarter
would not be possible.
So on behalf of the CPE team, thank you for your involvement in our
quarterly work! This is as much your bragging rights as it is ours :)

## Fedora
### RPMautospec
This project was originally prototyped early last year and presented
at Nest with Fedora last August. It was a body of work that would
relieve packagers from the burden of manually updating the Release
field and %changelog section in RPM spec files.
Some of the highlights of this project that the team delivered was:
* Implemented a simplified release enumeration algorithm (from the
discussion on the devel list and with FESCo)
* Reflect flags to %autorelease in generated changelog entries
* `fedpkg local`, `fedpkg mockbuild` (possibly `fedpkg srpm`)
supports rpmautospec features, i.e. prepare the SRPM on the fly as
Koji would do it before building.
* Allows for uncommitted changes in local builds with fedpkg, i.e.
bump the release number by one and generate a boilerplate “-
uncommitted changes” RPM changelog entry.
* Up-to-date and more complete documentation :)

You can read more detailed information on this project from the repo
https://pagure.io/docs/fedora-infra/rpmautospec/ and from the fedora
mailing list https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fedoraproject.org/thread/J5ACDK4UEGHU2CPWIT2MF7A7G5O2MXJC/


### Infrastructure & Release Engineering
* F34 was released! https://fedoramagazine.org/announcing-fedora-34/
* New Status Page released! https://www.fedorastatus.org/
* Fedora Accounts got new features in staging that will be deployed to
production soon:
    * Noggin (upstream project name) now supports Matrix IDs as well
as IRC nicknames https://github.com/fedora-infra/noggin/pull/668
    * Integrated the Spammish app into Noggin
https://github.com/fedora-infra/noggin/pull/672
    * FPCA status displayed on Noggin’s user page
* https://fedoraloveskde.org site was deployed in staging and production
* A *lot* of builder fixing and module cleanup
* Behind-the-scenes work:
    * updates to services and applications, eg Bodhi
    * Upgraded machines to F34
    * Fedocal now runnning on Openshift rather than VMs
    * Mass update/reboot to systems



## CentOS
### CentOS Stream 9
* Development composes are available https://composes.stream.centos.org/
* Container Images are available
https://quay.io/repository/centos/centos?tag=stream9-development&tab=tags
* Quickstart Contribution Guide available
https://docs.centos.org/en-US/stream-contrib/quickstart/
* New SIG approved: Feature Request SIG for CentOS Stream
https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-devel/2021-April/076716.html
* Centpkg development and release
* CentOS Stream 9 build system is publicly viewable
https://kojihub.stream.centos.org/koji/
* CentOS Stream 9 package sources are publicly available in GitLab
https://gitlab.com/redhat/centos-stream/rpms

### CentOS Stream 8
*  CentOS Stream 8 repository pipeline upgraded to merge new composes
rather than replacing the previous content giving users the ability to
`dnf downgrade` packages easily. More info
https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-devel/2021-May/076839.html
*  Centos8-stream buildroot available for missing -devel pkgs
https://pagure.io/centos-infra/issue/316

### CentOS Linux
* CentOS Linux 8 had a new release derived from Red Hat Enterprise
Linux 8.4 Source Code! Read more here
https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-devel/2021-June/077021.html

### Infrastructure & Release Engineering
* EPEL repositories (plain rpms, no module content) can be enabled on
demand on CBS for:
    * epel 7 (x86_64, ppc64le, aarch64)
    * epel 8 Everything (x86_64, ppc64le, aarch64)
    * epel Next 8 Everything (x86_64, ppc64le, aarch64)
* Auth system switch completed in April bringing both CentOS and
Fedora backend system under one stack and allowing contributors to
both projects use one email for both projects! More info:
https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-devel/2021-April/076694.html
* Deployed some instances for Artwork SIG to test centos visual theme
for www/blog/mirror/mailman https://pagure.io/centos-infra/issue/366


This report is really only a snapshot of the volume of work the people
on the Community Platform Engineering do, and also at a more high
level overview, but even still there are *a lot* of very noteworthy
successes in there that we are very proud of delivering this quarter,
and we hope the communities we are part of and serve find value in the
work we do too.

Have a lovely weekend everyone, and I will be back with our plans for
July, August and September with links to the projects work trackers
and their respective goals that we are going to shoot for in Q3 very
soon (like, next week) :)


Kindest regards,
Aoife
--
Aoife Moloney
Product Owner
Community Platform Engineering Team
Red Hat EMEA
Communications House
Cork Road
Waterford