ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[Robert Park <robert.park@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello.

As some of you might have heard, there is a plan brewing to replace
the CI Train spreadsheet with an alternate tool that is more...
robust.

In keeping with that plan, today I've made some architectural changes
to the citrain codebase that has resulted in a small user-facing
change (sorry, the spreadsheet isn't going away *quite* yet...).

So what does this mean for users of the spreadsheet? In the event that
you want to reconfigure your silo (if you add or remove an MP), the
button to reconfigure has moved out of the dashboard and into column L
of the spreadsheet.

I know what you're thinking. "How does adding a feature to the
spreadsheet get us closer to eliminating the spreadsheet?" The answer
is simple:

The only reason that reconfigure button was ever able to live in the
dashboard in the first place was that the jenkins backend had a bunch
of code in it for fetching and extracting data from the spreadsheet.
By eliminating that code, I've made the jenkins backend completely
agnostic about the source of landing request details. So this means
that the flow of information during a silo assignment/reconfigure is
no longer bidirectional, but spreadsheet->jenkins only. So since
jenkins no longer has a way to query the spreadsheet for landing
details, it means that the button to inject landing info into jenkins
must exist at the source of that info, and that source is currently
the spreadsheet.

What this means is, it's now *possible* that some
spreadsheet-alternative tool can arise and inject landing requests
into citrain, and citrain will require only very minimal code changes
to accomodate that.

So, fear not! This does indeed get us closer to a glorious,
spreadsheet-free future.