Re: Toolchain Infrastructure project statement of support

Mark Wielaard
2022-10-17T15:11:07Z

Hi Carlos,

On Wed, Oct 12, 2022 at 12:43:09PM -0400, Carlos O'Donell wrote:
> The GNU Toolchain project leadership [...]

I must say I don't understand why you are communicating in this way.
Sending out "proclamations" about having support from "leadership",
"committees" and "key stakeholders". Some of these key people seem to
not even agree with it or know what it is really about and they cannot
or don't want to answer questions about the details.

In the last year we did some really nice work for the sourceware
infrastructure. We setup the shared buildbot, got various companies and
organisations to provide compute resources, workers for various
architectures. We now have CI, Try and Full builders for various
projects and doing 10.000+ builds a month. With a bunsen analysis
database with all those test-results. Did a resource analysis and wrote
up this public roadmap to make the email/git based workflow that
sourceware projects rely on more fun, secure and productive by
automating contribution tracking and testing. We now also have the
sourcehut mirror and the public-inbox instance to make the email
workflow nicer and support things like patch attestation. We are
working on better integration between patchwork and buildbot for pre-
commit checking. And we got the Software Freedom Conservancy to accept
sourceware as a member project to act as a fiscal sponsor. They are now
helping us with the future roadmap, setting up a organization,
budgeting, etc. And the FSF also is supportive of this.

All this was done in public, we even setup some public video chats
about how we wanted to do this in the future. And you were explicitly
invited to participate because we wanted to make sure it fit with any
other plans people might be having.

At the Cauldron, when we wanted to discuss with the community how to
use and set project policies around the sourceware infrastructure
services, one of the "leaders" ran around the room shouting down and
pushing people who wanted to discuss this. Telling people they didn't
got to decide what we would talk about. And finally yelling at me that
I lost all trust of the "gnu toolchain leadership". All just for
wanting to have a public discussion on some cool stuff we did and were
planning to do together. That isn't "leadership". That is just
intimidation and bullying. It made me really sad.

And now you again seem to not want to discuss any details on how to
work together. After Cauldron I thought we agreed we would discuss
goals on overseers and create sourceware infrastructure bugs. So we
could see what the community priorities were, write an updated
sourceware roadmap, setup a budget, etc.

I was really happy to see the discussions about setting up a video chat
system for projects, the FSF tech-team offering to setup mirrors,
backups and help coordinate secure release uploads. And I had hoped to
see some discussion on how the LF and potential sponsors could help,
working together with the sourceware community and the SFC.

We really would love for gdb, glibc, binutils and gcc to keep being
part of sourceware.

Cheers,

Mark