Future development of Ofborg

[Mic92]

Since there is the question what we should do this in future, it would be good to figure out,
who would like to work on this and how much time you think you could spend on this.

Contribution could fall into one of the two categories or both:

1. Infrastructure maintenance
2. Development

[nixos-discourse]

This issue has been mentioned on NixOS Discourse. There might be relevant details there:

https://discourse.nixos.org/t/infrastructure-announcement-the-future-of-ofborg-your-help-needed/56025/36

[crertel]

I'm interested in helping on this, though my knowledge is not great. It feels like there's maybe a three-stage problem here:

1. Stage 1: How do we secure some breathing room so people aren't working through Christmas or making a botnet to exploit Github Actions?
2. Stage 2: How do we moved to cheaper hosting/secure hardware of our own and park it somewhere?
3. Stage 3: What options to we have to reduce the footprint of the project entirely so that we don't have have to keep relying on donations/corporate sponsorship?

[Mic92]

1. Stage 1: How do we secure some breathing room so people aren't working through Christmas or making a botnet to exploit Github Actions?

At the moment it looks like there might be no botnet needed (and also I haven't seen anyone suggesting it). Infinisil managed to evaluate all 4 architectures with 4 Actions in under 5 minutes while also using ./pkgs/top-level/release-outpaths.nix (https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/356023/files). On github we have concurrent 60 runners, so we should have some basic coverage for a while and hopefully get faster results than what ofborg currently delivers where the queue time is currently 18h (?) for evaluation.

[crertel]

That's really great news! Good work @infinisil !

EDIT: also thank you amjoseph is appears!

[Mic92]

amjoseph did a good part of this work. It was actually supposed to end up in ofborg before he took a break from the nix-community.

[Eveeifyeve]

2. Stage 2: How do we moved to cheaper hosting/secure hardware of our own and park it somewhere?

What would be a cheeper infra then github actions, would be what bun currently uses which is buildkite which has a much cheeper pricing then github actions.

[wolfgangwalther]

I would like to help and go through all the issues and PRs to close those that don't matter anymore, now that we do a lot of stuff in nixpkgs. Would be great, if I could get triaging rights here, to be able to close issues and PRs.

[infinisil]

Only @cole-h is admin of this repo, but it doesn't look like they're active anymore.

@NixOS/org I propose making @wolfgangwalther and @dasJ (who is the most recently active person working on this repo) admins of this repo, sound good?

[cole-h]

I've made @dasJ admin on this repo.

EDIT: and also made them a maintainer of the ofborg-maintainers team, so they can add further members as they see fit.

[infinisil]

Thanks!

@dasJ You can now decide to give @wolfgangwalther triage or admin access :D

[dasJ]

I went with Triage for now, but will likely elevate at some point