Stories from the amazing world of release-monitoring.org

How I got here

One wise man once said: “It is always best to start from the beginning”.

Our story begins in August 2018. I was summoned by the Archmage (my ex-manager Jim Perrin) to be part of the mage conclave (Fedora Infrastructure team) and take care of a world that laid abandoned for some time. The name of this realm is release-monitoring.org and Jim recommended I start on the continent of Anitya (web server).

I began to study this world and communed with the mage conclave, especially with previous caretaker of this world, honorable mage Jeremy Cline. I learned a lot about this realm (especially Anitya) and fixed a small issue here and there in order to make the world a better place for its inhabitants.

After few weeks I became more confident when walking through the continent of Anitya, and started working on bigger things that hopefully helped the inhabitants of this world to have better life.

Sometimes I made a mistake, which displeased the inhabitants greatly, but we identified these issues together (thanks for every bug report) and fixed most of them (thanks to all contributors).

After a few months Jim Perrin came to me again with another task from the amazing realm of release-monitoring.org. He said to me: “Here in these lands lies a place that is key to this world and it lay abandoned for far too long. You have proven yourself when taking care of the continent of Anitya, so here by the power entrusted in me I’m naming you the caretaker of the island of the-new-hotness.”

So I went to this island to see it with my own eyes, and I was terrified at first. This island was connected to a plethora of other things in the Fedora planetary system, most of them which I have never seen before and were alien to me. Most of the island was untouched by mage trials (unit tests). It took me some time to get accustomed to it. Today I know that there is still much that needs to be done, but at least I understand how it works and I am trying to make it better.

This was the beginning of my journey as a member of the conclave. I want to thank every mage that helped me and had patience with me.

State of the magic union

Oh yes, the present. What is happening in the world of the release-monitoring.org right now? Here I shall list a few things that are currently in the magic cookbook.

Our conclave recently communed and began working on new means of communication between our worlds. Forget the flying owls (fedmsg) that could be lost on the way to the target world, and behold the magical mirrors (Fedora messaging). This will help communicate more reliably than ever before.

Anitya is now in pretty good shape and new incantations are now going through the purgatory (Anitya 0.15.0 is deployed in staging). It brings few small changes and one big – the new means of communication (Migration to Fedora messaging). Right now I work with other mages from our conclave to make it perform as expected. It takes plenty of magic energy to work through all the obstacles, but in the end it will create a wonderful new experience.

This week I have been working on a new formula which should change the way of obtaining news from the world of libraries.io (Making libraries.io SSE consumer part of Anitya). If you are familiar with this world, you know that it server a role similar to release-monitoring.org. This will help our conclave free some resources (retire librariesio2fedmsg) and help us focus on other tasks. It will also let us know about the news that we don’t chase by ourselves (initially the libraries.io consumer will watch for projects from pypi and rubygems).

And what of the island of the-new-hotness? There is also a new means of communication being tested in the purgatory together with Anitya (Migration to Fedora messaging), so you can look forward to a more reliable and happier release-monitoring.org in the future.

Recently the-new-hotness had issues when communicating with the realm of Bugzilla. Our worker got there and the gate was closed. He shouted at the gate, but it didn’t open for him or any subsequent worker we sent (the-new-hotness was unable to log in to Bugzilla and it tried it with every new request). So our conclave dispatched an emissary to this world and obtained a key (API key) to the gate for our workers. We gave the key to our workers, and they can now move freely through the gate. (Fixed login issue with Bugzilla)

Reading from the crystal ball

What does the future holds for the release-monitoring.org? In fact plenty of things. Last week I decided to got through the Bugcronomicon (GitHub issues) and picked some of them for next spellweaving session (milestone 0.16.0 for Anitya and 0.12.0 for the-new-hotness).

Here are some of the things planned for Anitya:

Change the running wheel to a reliable servant (Turn anitya cron job to service). The new servant should provide reports directly to us (statistics about the checks for new releases and failure rates) and it will constantly check for couriers with new messages (queues instead of a list of projects to check).
Teach new languages to Anitya scribes (Add semantic and calendar version scheme). This will allow us to better understand the news we are receiving (sorting other than by RPM version scheme).
Add another guard dog (Prevent creation of duplicate projects). We have plenty of uninvited guests that are often same as the ones we already have in our realm. This is confusing. Another guard dog will smell anyone who is already in our realm and don’t allow them inside again.
Lifting curses (Fixing bugs)

And here are some things for the-new-hotness island:

Add more mage trials (Add more unit tests)
Establish connection with the realm of Pagure (File pull requests instead of attaching patches to Bugzilla). Magical energies will be redirected from Bugzilla to Pagure. This will make a more direct connection between release-monitoring.org and the communities of ever vigilant guards (package maintainers) in Pagure. Also your energies will be tested by the Pagure watcher community (filing a pull request will trigger CI tests).
Send our emissaries to the Flathub realm (Add support for creating github issues for Flathub). Establish contact with the world of Flathub and help them a little by using the power of release-monitoring.org. We will let them know about news that they could miss (file new GitHub issue when a new version is detected by Anitya).

This is all for now from the world of release-monitoring.org. Do you like this world and want to join our conclave of mages? Seek me (mkonecny) in the magical yellow pages (IRC freenode #fedora-apps) and ask how can you help. Or visit the Bugcronomicon (GitHub issues on Anitya or the-new-hotness) directly and pick something to work on.