Merge branch 'master' into rorcz
[girocco.git] / html / volunteers.html
blob4fde8b24718e5e8c2b2836fce4a0aae00a89536d
1 @section=site guide
2 @heading=Volunteers
3 @header
5 <!-- This file is preprocessed by cgi/html.cgi -->
8 <p>repo.or.cz is not currently looking for volunteers who would like to help running and developing the site (we had too much feedback!) We are
9 currently in the process of setting up the first collectively run admin team to
10 replace Petr Baudis as the sole site maintainer and developer.</p>
12 <p>Who do we want:</p>
13 <ul>
14 <li>People with motivation to help out one of the largest public Git hosting
15 sites who don't mind helping out some poor user once in a week and/or want
16 to enhance repo.or.cz services and features while also fixing few bugs
17 in the process</li>
18 <li>People with reasonable experience in all of UNIX/GNU, shell scripting,
19 Perl and Git itself</li>
20 <li>Trustworthy persons with no bad history and preferrably some existing
21 open-source community involvement - ideally (but not required) in the Git
22 community</li>
23 <li>People who don't mind working in a team, are willing to put up with
24 a perfectionist <a href="mailto:pasky@ucw.cz">pasky</a> at the beginning
25 and can get used to thinking thrice before doing something on the live
26 database</li>
27 </ul>
29 <p>What will you do (at least some of... ;-):</p>
30 <ul>
31 <li>Supporting users over email, possibly IRC. We get one support issue
32 per week on average, usually project deletion requests.</li>
33 <li>Other maintenance tasks - checking if jobs don't get stuck, possible
34 project breakage, reviewing+applying patches from users, monitoring
35 bogus content tags usage, cleaning up badly created projects and handling
36 server overload (all fairly rare occurences)</li>
37 <li>Implement gadgets to ease your maintenance tasks- could be e.g. issue
38 tracking system or ability for users to remove projects themselves.</li>
39 <li>Fix repo.or.cz bugs. E.g. the mirroring process gets stuck once in a while
40 on misbehaving mirror source, and sometimes objects get lost during gc that
41 shouldn't.</li>
42 <li>Implement cool new features. E.g. something from the
43 <a href="/w/girocco.git/blob/HEAD:/TODO">Girocco TODO list</a>,
44 cleaning up and adding support for more mirroring source VCSes, user experience
45 improvements, maybe some interesting statistical analysis...</li>
46 </ul>
48 <p>What's in it for you:</p>
49 <ul>
50 <li>Most importantly, good warm feeling in your heart! ;-)</li>
51 <li>Chance to play with a reasonably large site and try out interesting
52 things.</li>
53 <li>Learning more UNIX/shell/perl/git on a very practical project.</li>
54 <li>Getting more involved in the Git development community, getting general
55 experience with OSS development of something that's actually immediately useful.</li>
56 <li>Low and totally flexible time demands.</li>
57 <li>Nice CV point to be sure!</li>
58 </ul>
60 <p>Are you interested? Please apply at <a href="mailto:pasky@ucw.cz">pasky@ucw.cz</a>.
61 (Note: If you want to look at the current repo.or.cz codebase or even
62 deploy a copy locally to play with, just look at <a href="/w/girocco.git">girocco.git</a>.)
64 <p>TODO: Make everything below this line less public. ;-)
65 So far, no huge deal I guess.
66 Volunteers can see what will they work with.</p>
68 <hr />
70 <h2>The Admin Team Plan</h2>
72 <p>These are pasky's ideas on how to set up the admin team and transfer
73 control to it:</p>
75 <ul>
76 <li>Gather feedback and confirmation from volunteers that already applied.</li>
77 <li>Set up admin@repo.or.cz alias plus internal mailing list.</li>
78 <li>Create accounts for new recruits with sudo access to the 'repo' account.
79 (We just got a complete tree backup while migrating, so we can be liberal
80 and relatively trusting at the beginning. ;)</li>
81 <li>Let the new recruits start helping out and self-organizing. There will
82 be probably need to create a deployment staging area and some cooperation
83 rules to avoid race conditions, but I'd prefer the new admin team to already
84 figure that out for themselves.</li>
85 <li>Give the two or three most experienced members root access after a while.</li>
86 <li>Pasky would like to stay in the loop and keep veto power for a while
87 to protect the site from some bad deterioration or major turnovers.</li>
88 </ul>
90 <p>New admins rules:</p>
92 <ul>
93 <li>Do not be shy doing stuff. If you are not doing it, noone else probably
94 is either. Just send a mail when you start doing something, and another
95 when you are done.</li>
96 <li>Document everything you do outside of your sandbox. On the mailing list
97 for starters, we can figure out better book-keeping later. Reply on admin@
98 to all user requests that you have handled.</li>
99 <li>Ask for consultations and acks whenever you have shadow of doubt.</li>
100 <li>Think trice. Avoid doing unrevertable things!</li>
101 <li>Think once. Make plenty of non-destructive quick experiments to learn about
102 stuff.</li>
103 <li>No abuse. We need to nurture the goodwill of our connection sponsors.
104 No peer-to-peer filesharing!</li>
105 <li>Do not use Ctrl-C to quit screen. You could kill a task!</ul>
106 </ul>
108 <hr />
110 <h2>Cookbook</h2>
112 <p>Working as <code>repo</code> user:</p>
114 <ul>
115 <li>All infrastructure is owned by the repo user, and runs as repo (except
116 web scripts, suexec is not set up - for now?)</li>
117 <li><em>Always</em> work under the shared screen so others can check out who
118 is working on what: <code>screen -x repo/admins</code>, this will get you to
119 our shared screen session. jobd (updating mirrors, running gc) and taskd
120 (creating mirrors, push notifications) run in the first two windows. Shells in
121 screen are owned by user <code>repo</code></li>.
122 <li>Live copy lives in <code>~/repomgr</code> and <code>~/WWW</code>,
123 chroot jail for pushing is in <code>~/j</code>, codebase is in
124 <code>~/repo</code>.</li>
125 <li>Do <em>not</em> work directly in <code>~/repo</code>. If you want to
126 edit files, clone <code>Girocco.git</code> and push after committing (and
127 verifying) your changes locally.</li>
128 <li>To update the live copy, <code>cd ~/repo</code>, <code>git pull</code>
129 (should fast-forward), then <code>make install</code>.
130 This will OVERWRITE complete <code>~/repomgr</code>!</li>
131 </ul>
133 <p>New admins checklist:</p>
135 <ul>
136 <li>Make yourself a <code>.forward</code> file so that you receive admin@ mail.</li>
137 <li>Add yourself to <a href="/h/admins.html">the admin team page</a>,
138 which is also a nice way to get comfortable with our girocco setup.</li>
139 <li>Send a short introduction to admin@repo.or.cz.</li>
140 <li>Take a look at the list of TODO items in rorcz branch of girocco. Perhaps you could tackle something right away?</li>
141 <li>If you are bored, ask for some ideas! Or perhaps we can bounce to you some requests we did not have time to deal with. Don't be shy!</li>
142 <li>Please check periodically that the jobd in screen window 0 is not stuck.</li>
143 <li>Try to deal with something from <a href="/w/girocco.git/blob/rorcz:/TODO">the TODO list</a>.</li>
144 </ul>
146 <p>Removing a project:</p>
148 <ul>
149 <li>Philosophically, I'm not too happy to remove a project unless there's
150 a good reason like turning it to a mirror or some consolidation or legal
151 reasons (or it's almost empty); I believe in archiving everything. This position
152 can change if others disagree.</li>
153 <li><code>mv /srv/git/project.git /srv/git-recyclebin/</code> - move forks
154 properly within the hierarchy, let pasky know in case of permissions problem
155 (ALWAYS remove by mv to recyclebin, never by deleting the directory for good)</li>
156 <li><code>vi ~repo/j/etc/group</code>, find the line for the project and
157 remove it from the file. Don't keep the file open to avoid races.</li>
158 </ul>
160 <p>Backups: There is a nightly rsync cronjob that backs up metadata to another
161 machine (which is now physically in the same building so we should do something
162 better long-term). No backlog is kept!</p>
164 <p>Other things running on the server:</p>
166 <ul>
167 <li>Pasky stores some harmless data on the server. He may run some niced
168 computations time by time if he thinks the server is really idle.</li>
169 <li>There is a mailman instance running on the server that serves also
170 a beekeepers' mailing list.</li>
171 <li>The server provides slave DNS services for few domains.</li>
172 <li>There is a compendium of RSS-&gt;IRC gateways for couple of Czech news servers.</li>
173 <li>A tiny IRC bot + assorted services.</li>
174 </ul>