html/volunteers.html

   1 @section=site guide
   2 @heading=Volunteers
   3 @header
   4
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   6
   7
   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>
  11
  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>
  28
  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>
  47
  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>
  59
  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>.)
  63
  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>
  67
  68 <hr />
  69
  70 <h2>The Admin Team Plan</h2>
  71
  72 <p>These are pasky's ideas on how to set up the admin team and transfer
  73 control to it:</p>
  74
  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>
  89
  90 <p>New admins rules:</p>
  91
  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>
 107
 108 <hr />
 109
 110 <h2>Cookbook</h2>
 111
 112 <p>Working as <code>repo</code> user:</p>
 113
 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>
 132
 133 <p>New admins checklist:</p>
 134
 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>
 145
 146 <p>Removing a project:</p>
 147
 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>
 159
 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>
 163
 164 <p>Other things running on the server:</p>
 165
 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>