Hi devs, this month, a heated exchange on kde-core-devel about a dep change breaking CI has moved us to draft a new policy to better handle situations like this in the future.
While not "law", the policy _strongly_ suggests some guidelines forming a quid-pro-pro protocol between developers and sysadmin when it comes to making software dependency changes that impact provisioning of the CI system. It should leave everyone with a solid idea of what is expected of them and how to behave around dependency changes. Essentially, it requires developers to put sysadmin in the loop when pre-announcing dep changes, giving them some time to ready the CI system environment, and giving them an opportunity to ask for more time when needed, while leaving maintainers/teams in ultimate control over making the change. Meanwhile, sysadmin does its best to procure new deps or communicate if/why it can't. Worst case scenarios/failure modes and when and where to escalate special cases are specified as well. The draft is located here: https://community.kde.org/Policies/Dependency_Changes_and_CI While it's not too late to raise objections and comments, please only do so after reviewing the kde-core-devel thread that lead to its creation to see how it stands in the big picture. A sizable number have already deliberated this draft. It's con- structive to assume they did so with care. The thread: https://marc.info/?t=148360605500002&r=1&w=2 The current plan calls for linking the new policy from the /Policies/ overview page at the start of February, thereby making it official and putting it into action. And then we live with it for some time and see if it serves us well going forward. Cheers, Eike
