Continuing from my post on cloud@...
On Thu, Oct 6, 2022 at 6:21 PM Bryan Davis <bd808(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
On Thu, Oct 6, 2022 at 5:39 AM Taavi Väänänen <hi(a)taavi.wtf> wrote:
In general, I feel that over the last few months,
quite a lot of planning and progress reporting has moved from our
various public channels (most notably Phabricator and -cloud-admin on
IRC) to private ones. I don't particularly like this trend.
I did a thing in my late afternoon yesterday that may have aggravated
Tavvi's feelings of being left out of decision loops.
I made a decision without consulting any other Toolforge admins to add
about 300MiB of fonts to the php7.4 Docker image available for use on
Toolforge [0]. This decision reversed my prior blocking of this exact
same request in 2019 [1]. It also goes against at least as many years
of the Toolforge admins telling the Toolforge member community that we
do not "bloat" the Kubernetes containers with specialty features for a
small number of use cases. This reversal will complicate future
decisions on such issues by introducing this easily seen counter
example. I acted with good intent in the moment, but I did not act
with good judgement nor consideration of my partners in maintaining
the Toolforge infrastructure. For that I am truly sorry.
I would also like to apologize for treating what I was doing as
"urgent" when it could have easily waited for a discussion with others
either in code review or in other forums. This false urgency was
counter to what I know to be the best way to treat technical decisions
and it was disrespectful of my co-admins in the Toolforge environment.
I would also like to have a conversation among the Toolforge admins
about how to best deal with this decision going forward. That
conversation is probably better had on Phabricator or the cloud-admin
mailing list than here, but it should happen and it should result in
either reverting the change that I made or jointly creating updated
guidelines for what is and is not acceptable in the shared Kubernetes
containers while we await better methods of managing per-tool feature
differences.
[0]:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T310435#8288848
[1]:
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/operations/docker-images/toollabs-images/+…
For the fonts themselves, should we:
* Revert the change and tell svgtranslate to move back to the grid?
* Propagate the change outward by making the same/similar change to
all php images?
* Propagate the change outward by making the same/similar change to
all base images?
* Let it be.
For the bigger picture of breaking our long held stance on "bloat", I
would like to hear suggestions from y'all. If the font decision is to
revert then maybe there is nothing to talk about here. If the fonts
stay then I think there is a need to either document this as a rogue
action that has been allowed to stand which should not set a precedent
for the future or to come up with a rubric for what is allowed and
why.
I am also open to hearing from anyone on or off list who feels that I
need to make additional amends to the Toolforge admins, the Toolforge
user community, or any particular individuals. I really didn't mean to
make a mess, but I did and I would like to work towards correcting
that as much as possible.
Bryan
PS I will be out of office until 2022-10-11, but I will try to check
in on this thread in the intervening days.
--
Bryan Davis Technical Engagement Wikimedia Foundation
Principal Software Engineer Boise, ID USA
[[m:User:BDavis_(WMF)]] irc: bd808