New Direct CDN Beta, Jira Workflow Changes

[drobbins]

New Direct CDN Beta!

A new Funtoo Direct CDN infrastructure is currently in beta. Leveraging our kind support from CDN77, this new infrastructure vastly improves distfile downloads. I will describe some of the technology behind this in a future post, but for now just know it fixes a "lot of things", and you can test it out by adding the following to your /etc/make.conf:

GENTOO_MIRRORS="https://direct.funtoo.org"

In the next Funtoo release of Portage, coming in the next few days, this CDN will become our default (meaning portage will use this new CDN after an upgrade without any /etc/make.conf setting) and the older fastpull will be deprecated.

Jira Changes!

I've made several changes to Jira that the Funtoo Community should be aware of. The Jira workflow has been optimized -- all new issue will now be in the "Needs Triage" state. Funtoo Senior Staff will be able to triage issues, filling out an Impact field describing the impact of the issue, and setting a Priority to more clearly reflect the severity of the issue and its negative impact. Once an issue has been triaged, it is then ready to be worked on by a member of the Funtoo Community.

There is also now a hard-limit maximum of 5 issues that any given user may have in an "In Progress" or "Test/Integration" state at one time. This was done to prevent people (such as myself -- I am the worst offender) of accumulating many, many issues that are theoretically in progress but are really stalled. To help make this less painful, you can now move issues out of your "in progress" stack by clicking "stalled" -- this will result in the issue being unassigned from you and moved into the "Work Queue". 

In the past, "Work Queue" could not be touched by mere mortals, meaning you couldn't "Start Work" on anything in Work Queue, making this issue state kind of useless to anyone. This limitation has been removed! This means that you should not be afraid to use the "Stalled" button to move things out of your In Progress bucket, because you can always "Start Work" on these issues again when you are ready to resume work.

As part of this new change, I have also moved 50+ issues from "In Progress" to "Needs Triage". If anyone needs an issue triaged so that it can be moved back to "In Progress", please let @drobbins or @seemant know! (Otherwise we will triage the issues as soon as we can.)

So, how do you know when you've reached your 5-issue In Progress limit? Jira currently doesn't show you any warning -- you will just not be given the option to "Start Work" on any new issues. Want an easier way to keep track of what is in your In Progress stack? -- Use this query:  https://bugs.funtoo.org/issues/?filter=12503 (To find this in the future, go to Jira -> Issues -> My Bugs In Progress).

The goal of these Jira changes is to help to optimize our overall utilization of Jira to increase our velocity, and also ultimately allow "In Progress" status to reflect the reality of what is truly being actively worked on, and help us to work better as a distributed team. This also positively coerces us to close out those "almost done" issues to free up our availability, which I think is a really good development practice.

I am continually open to feedback about Jira so if you have some additional suggestions on how to improve things, be sure to find me on Discord and let's chat!