Dear Board,
CC/Pono
This is an update for the progress we are making with OSUOSL and with the SFC's recommended contractor Ben Sturmfels who will hopefully be available to make the deployment of the new version of the website onto the new machine and help with the couple of other things like backups.
I just had a video meeting with Ben to get him up to date on the structure, history, deployment considerations and talk a bit bout how we will handle paying for his time. He's going to communicate back with the SFC to set up a contract and I want us to be ready to review the proposed budget for the scheduled work. Lance at the OSUOSL had been in recent contact about the new machine and I have got Ben and Lance into the same support ticket to make sure we deploy the right things.
Rather than guess or estimate, I'm going to ask the SFC to formulate a cost since the work is fairly well understood. This will make it easier to review for other members of the plc and hopefully approve it.
Thanks for baring with the infrastructure process.
Best Regards, Martin Owens
On Mon, 2025-05-12 at 23:57 -0400, Martin Owens wrote:
Dear Board,
I would like to request a budget on behalf of the website/infrastructure team to pay for someone to perform and complete our website upgrade.
# Background
Now that the ~1.4.1~ 1.4.2 release is done, we can finally deal with a backlogged infrastructure issue. Which is that the website is not currently able to be updated¹. This has happened because the version of the website has been upgraded thanks to work by @pgcd² to move us to a much more modern version of django, django-cms, python etc. As well as fixing up the test suite from multiple mutations.
But this work can't be deployed to our webserver. The webserver is also old, and part of the discussion with OSUOSL was upgrading this machine to something newer. They'd like for us to have a machine they control and simply have us deploy our code and data to the new machine. But this comes with a lot of extra hand holding to make sure the web server machine, and a lot of the configuration we've set up on live to cope with bad actors DDOSing our site. As well as doing all the necessary bits to make sure the site is actually deployable in a hands off way.
We can't deploy any new fixes to the website until this is unblocked. (For example the recent request to make news articles set in the future, not appear to be published, when they are't (yet)).
# Request
I'd like to hire pgcd to finish up the work. Partly this step requires someone who can be trusted, to have access to machines, or data, and I'd prefer if that person was legally bound to do the right time. And this is the sort of thing that I'd ideally like us to pay for anyway.
I haven't put together the scale of budget this might require. But I think $4k-$6k would be a useful amount to pay for hours necessary at the standard SFC rate. Including having the contractor talk with and coordinate with OSUOSL and cut out some possible bottlenecks when hopping through volunteers.
I'd like the new site to go through Fastly CDN for all pages. Not just media pages. So coordination with a new configuration on Fastly will also be needed. Plus testing of a testing site.
I'd also like to include the creation and testing of data backups. Something that scared the daylights out of me with our current situation.
# Final Thoughts
I haven't sent this as a vote as I think it needs a bit of mulling over before we bring it to a vote. So let me know if you can, I'd like to get this sorted out soon though as the target for a test website deployment shouldn't wait until we're in the middle of a new release.
Thanks!
Best Regards, Martin Owens
¹ Except for some small tweaks which are kept out of tree, Which I don't like doing. But were needed for the DDOS protections. ² See https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape-web/-/commits/master _______________________________________________ Inkscape Board of Directors mailing list -- inkscape-board@lists.inkscape.org To unsubscribe send an email to inkscape-board-leave@lists.inkscape.org