[CentOS-devel] Let's setup the CentOS Integration SIG

Thu Aug 31 12:52:55 UTC 2023
Aleksandra Fedorova <alpha at bookwar.info>

Hi, all,

I'd like to propose a new Special Interest Group focused on integration 
efforts around CentOS Stream.

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# Introduction

Integration is verifying that products and services built on top of RHEL 
or CentOS Stream will continue to work on CentOS Stream and the next 
release of RHEL and will not break on package updates.

As RHEL content becomes available only after the release, RHEL-based 
services traditionally use a catching-up integration pattern: people 
have to adjust their products and services to work on new RHEL *after* 
the update is shipped. Adjusting the services takes time, eating into 
the supported RHEL lifecycle period. It also reduces the options for how 
we can deal with breaking changes.

CentOS Stream provides a way to enable forward-looking integration: you 
can do the integration early during the development before the change is 
shipped to the CentOS Stream or RHEL repositories. This allows us to 
prevent or at least prepare better for any breaking changes, which might 
be shipped via CentOS Stream or RHEL updates.

# Purpose of the SIG

Provide a shared space to develop and maintain tooling and knowledge 
base on collaborative gating and testing of CentOS Stream updates before 
they are published to CentOS mirrors. This includes both - package-level 
and compose-level integration.

# Goals

* Document existing integration workflows used by other SIGs.
* Identify common issues.
* Manage, develop and promote the Third-Party CI for CentOS Stream.
   - Document events and triggers.
   - Document standard pipelines.
* Develop the Integration toolkit.

# Deliverables

* CentOS Stream Integration Guide

   The main focus of the SIG at least at the beginning would be to 
collect and maintain the knowledge base for integration patterns and 
tools used by other SIGs and community members.

* CentOS Third-Party CI service

   Eventually SIG may take the ownership of the third-party CI service 
(for example based on CentOS Stream Zuul CI) - this is to be discussed 
further.

# First work items

* Develop and document solution to the following question:
   “I have a test case/task I want to run on every change in CentOS and 
get notified about the failure. How do I do it?”

* Interview other SIGs for their integration workflows to identify 
common patterns, solutions and issues.

# Logistics (to be adjusted later by the SIG members)

* Matrix channel - No IRC
* Discourse tag - No mailing list
* Docs in some GitLab repo - No wiki
* Bi–weekly text-only office hours on Matrix channel
* (?) Occasional recorded video meeting


# Questions

1) Is the scope limited to integrations done by CentOS SIGs?

No. There are many ways one can integrate with the CentOS Stream. CentOS 
Project provides the option to do it via a CentOS SIG, but it is just 
one of the many possibilities. One can run integration workflows on 
their own infrastructure (both in the open or in private). We welcome 
everyone and would like to share the knowledge and tooling (and work 
items :) ) as much as possible.

2) Is the scope limited to integration with other FOSS projects?

No. While all the contributions (tooling, configurations, docs) of the 
SIG should be open and licensed under the licenses approved by the 
CentOS Project, you can participate in the SIG even when your primary 
project/product or service is not public. For example you can use 
integration tooling in your private labs and optionally contribute test 
results without sharing the access to your test systems.

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-- 
Aleksandra Fedorova
Matrix: @bookwar:fedora.im
Fediverse: @bookwar at fosstodon.org