Merge pull request #446 from rust-lang/infra-2019-11-05

Add 2019-11-06 infra meeting minutes

Author: pietroalbini

posts/inside-rust/2019-11-06-infra-team-meeting.md

@@ -0,0 +1,94 @@
+---
+layout: post
+title: "2019-11-05 Infrastructure Team Meeting"
+author: Pietro Albini
+team: the infrastructure team <https://www.rust-lang.org/governance/teams/operations#infra>
+---
+
+Meeting run by shepmaster. Minutes written by pietroalbini.  
+Attending: aidanhs, alexcrichton, kennytm, Mark-Simulacrum, pietroalbini, shepmaster  
+[Start of the conversation](https://discordapp.com/channels/442252698964721669/443148319431065610/641335927721033732)
+
+## Removing MSYS2 ca-certificates workaround (P-high issue)
+
+A few weeks ago our CI broke due to a broken `ca-certificates` MSYS2 package,
+which caused all Windows builders to fail. The temporary patch was to install a
+vendored copy of that package, and since it’s not needed anymore pietroalbini
+landed a PR this week removing the hack from our CI configuration.
+
+The other part of the issue is figuring out whether to vendor MSYS2 and MinGW
+as a whole, but there is the issue of keeping the mirrors sort of up to date,
+and we don’t have a clear idea on how to fix that at the moment. We decided to
+downgrade the issue to P-medium and to talk about mirroring and vendoring at
+the All Hands 2020. In preparation of that meeting it will be useful to audit
+what we mirror at the moment and how old that is, but it’s not urgent and
+nobody has the time to work on it right now.
+
+## Figuring out data retention on Azure Pipelines (P-medium issue)
+
+This is not yet an issue, as the current retention is configured to 2 years.
+We’re waiting on some talks with Microsoft to settle before starting to poke
+people about this again.
+
+## Re-enable LLVM/debug assertions on slow builders (P-medium issue)
+
+We still don’t have the time budget to enable them back, but increasing the
+core count should allow us to do that.
+
+## New server for perf
+
+alexcrichton ordered an
+[AX41-NVMe](https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/ax41-nvme) bare metal
+server from Hetzner as a replacement benchmarking machine for perf, paid by
+Mozilla. We’re waiting on Hetzner to give us access to it before simulacrum can
+try it out and configure it. If we don’t get access in a few days alexcrichton
+is going to ping them.
+
+## Lifecycle policy for static.rust-lang.org
+
+static.rust-lang.org is backed by a S3 bucket, and since 2016 versioning is
+enabled on the bucket to prevent issues with accidental file deletions. Some of
+the files in that bucket are overridden each day though (for example nightly
+compilers), keeping a bunch of past versions stored. Those past versions are
+useless as there isn’t an easy way to get them from the CDN, and the files are
+also stored separately in other places on that bucket. Everyone agreed we
+should enable lifecycle policy to delete those useless files, and we reached a
+consensus on deleting them after three months. This won’t be noticeable by end
+users, installing old nightlies by date will still work.
+
+## What to do with the rust-lang-ci S3 bucket
+
+`rust-lang-ci` is a really old and currently unused S3 bucket which was used to
+store CI artifacts before we migrated them to `rust-lang-ci2`. There are still
+some files in there, so we enabled bucket logging for a month to see how
+frequent files there were accessed.
+
+Turns out, we had a total of 86 successful requests in a month, split between:
+
+- 69 requests were accessing cargo builds of 1.14.0
+- 17 requests were accessing old CI mirrors
+
+Due to the low traffic we decided to remove those old CI mirrors, but for the
+cargo builds the question is more complicated. Due to a bug in the manifest
+generation back then, installing Rust 1.14.0 from rustup actually downloads
+Cargo from the bucket instead of the CDN, and removing those files would
+permanently break installing Rust 1.14.0. There was disagreement on whether to
+do that inside the team, and we reached the decision to wait until pietroalbini
+investigates whether redirects are feasible to configure in S3.
+
+## Early feedback on pietroalbini’s WIP ci-generate branch
+
+pietroalbini is working on a branch that implements a generator for our CI
+configuration, from a simplified custom DSL
+([branch](https://github.com/pietroalbini/rust/tree/ci-generate) -
+[documentation](https://github.com/pietroalbini/rust/tree/ci-generate/src/tools/generate-ci-config)).
+While the generator has a number of small benefits for us, the main driver
+between the creation of the branch is to work around some limitations in GitHub
+Actions’s configuration syntax, namely the lack of importable templates. There
+wasn’t time to properly discuss this so we deferred to next week.
+
+## Revisiting meeting run rotation
+
+A month ago we started rotating who runs the meetings, intending to revisit the
+decision today. The team felt either neutral or positive about the idea, so
+we’ll keep doing that for a while. aidanhs is going to run the next meeting.