[publican-list] [Fwd: Re: r1722 - in trunk/publican-fedora: . .tx]

[Jared Smith]

On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 4:57 PM, Jeff Fearn <jfearn at redhat.com> wrote:
> Fedora infrastructure has been running an instance of Transifex for some
> time. This installation has been plagued by terrible performance and an
> almost complete inability to maintain or upgrade it. AIUI almost all of
> these issues are related to the software itself.

Yes, Fedora has run a Transifex instance for a while.  There have been
performance issues, and the Fedora infrastructure team has been short
on manpower to maintain and upgrade it.  (And yes -- we've still got
an open position or two on the Infrastructure team -- we're working to
address that as well.)  At this point in time, the Fedora instance of
Transifex is a fairly old version (0.7, if my memory serves me) and it
woefully out of date from the current version (1.0 is the latest
release branch, and 1.1-dev is being used by a number of projects.)
There's been quite a lot of change to the software between those
versions, and much of that change was driven by the need for better
performance for high-volume instances and easier upgrades in the
future.

I'm sure our Infrastructure team would be more than happy to go into
the exact details, but I didn't get the feeling that the difficulty in
maintaining and upgrading Transifex was necessarily only because of
the software itself -- at least part of the difficulty was lack of
understanding of the tools (web frameworks, libraries, database
schemas) on the Fedora side, and that was compounded by an overworked
(and may I add under-appreciated) Infrastructure team.

> Travel forward to recent times when Fedora decided not to host an
> instance anymore, because it's unmaintainable, and so decided to migrate
> hosted applications without going to the rather obvious step of asking
> the associated projects if it was OK to migrate them to a commercial
> entities site.

I'll be honest -- the decision to move to Transifex.net happened
pretty fast.  In fact, I'd have preferred to wait until after the F15
release to make changes to our translation infrastructure.  I
discussed this with the Fedora L10N team last week, and they convinced
me that they'd rather see the change happen now rather than waiting
until after the F15 release.  I called a series of meetings with
representatives from the L10N team, the infrastructure team, the docs
team, FESCo, the Fedora Program Manager, and myself.  We carefully
weighed the pros and cons of moving to Transifex.net, and debated
whether or not to do it quickly, since we were already past the string
freeze for F15.  In the end, everyone agreed that it made sense to
move to Transifex.net as quickly as possible, as long as we had an
exit strategy should things not work according to plan.

Since then, we've migrated the data from our hosted instance to
Transifex.net, and begun the process of packaging the client-side
tools for Fedora packagers and developers.

After the Fedora 15 release, I'm more than happy to revisit the topic
of Fedora translation infrastructure, and decide from there whether to
stay on Transifex.net, move back to our own internally hosted
instance, or move to some other piece of software.  In the short term,
however, our translators need something that works better than our
current solution and they need it now.

I'm sorry that I couldn't consult with every single person that uses
our translation system.  I did try to make sure we announced it to the
L10N and Docs teams as early and loudly as possible, and I'll continue
to make additional announcements over the next few days.

> Now I for one am rather hesitant to move to a hosted commercial instance
> run by people who make software that a team of people can't update or
> maintain.

Ordinarily I'd be weary of moving to a commercial hosted solution as
well, but in this particular instance, I trust Dimitris (and, by
extension, Indifex) because I've seen the work they've done, how
they've treated the open source community, and how Dimitris handled
himself when he was on the Fedora Board.  No piece of software is
perfect (at least, not any that I've ever found), but the Transifex
team really is doing their best not only to make Transifex better, but
to address the concerns of Fedora.

Now, to be a bit pragmatic, any time you move from something you
control to something that someone else manages, you need to evaluate
the risks.  In this particular instance, we felt that the risks were
fairly low, as Indifex has promised us that they'll give us all our
translation date should we move off their hosted platform.  And since
the version they run in their hosted instance is the very same open
source version that we could deploy on our own (again, assuming we had
the manpower and familiarity with the software to do so).

> I'm double hesitant when the whole migration process was done
> without public consultation with the projects themselves.

There was plenty of public consultation with the Fedora teams (L10N,
Docs, FESCo, Infra, Board).  Like I said above, I'm sorry that I
wasn't able to consult with every single project that uses Fedora
infrastructure.  The time constraints (considering that we were
already at the string freeze, and any delay would have cut

> At this point I'm willing to wield my Project Leaders Veto on accepting
> transifex.net content. Giving commercial entities rights over our name
> and sources is a serious step, doing it without due consideration is
> rather foolish, and doing it on other peoples behalf is morally
> offensive and pretty much illegal.

That's certainly your prerogative as a project leader.  However, I'm
slightly confused by this paragraph -- would you mind giving me some
clarification?  I don't know what you mean by "rights over our name
and sources".  We're not giving Transifex any additional rights over
the Fedora trademark or over the translated strings -- the strings are
still licensed the exact same way as before.

As to the legality of moving to a hosted solution, I did make sure
that Fedora Legal was involved and got sign-off from them before
moving ahead with our migration.  If you feel that something we've
done is somehow illegal, please bring it to the attention of Fedora
Legal or the Red Hat legal department so that they're aware of your
concerns.

--
Jared Smith
Fedora Project Leader