[rdo-list] openstack-tripleo-ui automation

[Honza Pokorny]

Hello folks,

Over the last couple of months, it has become apparent that the process
for releasing new versions of the two TripleO UI RPMs
(openstack-tripleo-ui and openstack-tripleo-ui-deps) relies on manual
work done by humans.  As a result, making changes to the specs of the
said RPMs takes a long time, and causes delays in upstream CI.

>From my point of view (read: I'm not familiar with the finer details of
the inner workings of RDO), there are three manual tasks that need to be
performed when a change to a spec is required (most often it's a new
dependency):

1.  Licensing review

Obviously this step cannot be done by machines.  It has been suggested
to us that it would simplify things for reviewers if we included
transient dependency diffs as well --- we plan to do that going forward.

2.  openstack-tripleo-ui-deps PR merge

This step also cannot be done by machines.  However, we could streamline
this work by handling the reviewing and merging by using the RDO Gerrit
instead of GitHub.  I suspect that reviewers will be more likely to
review these kinds of patches faster than by having to go to GitHub
given that many of the other RDO projects are handled by Gerrit.

3.  Rebuilding RPM and publishing it

This step is the most opaque to the TripleO UI team.  Usually, we have
to ask someone on IRC to rebuild the package.  Then, it seems to be
published in two different places: CBS[1], which I understand to be a
staging environment of some kind, and the other place is unknown to me
but it's the place where the upstream CI can pick it up.  I have
repeatedly asked to gain to some read-only access to the progress of
these builds but have received none.  In order to speed up this work, I
would love to see some more automation of the build process, and more
visibility of the progress.

It's very likely that my understanding of the problem is misguided, and
I very much welcome your correction!  If you have suggestions on how the
TripleO UI team can make RDO's life easier, I'm all ears.

Thanks,

Honza Pokorny

[1]: https://cbs.centos.org/koji/packageinfo?packageID=4136