Inside Infra August 2024

Posted on: 2024-08-23 00:00:00+00:00

Welcome to Inside Infra for August, 2024

The HR Department

The Qbot assistant in the ASF Slack workspace is continuing to evolve. The latest addition is Lauren, a member of the imaginary ASF Human Resources department. Lauren occasionally appears in Infra team conversations, and we thought it would be fair to share her wisdom with the larger ASF community.

Lauren will eventually have a lot to say, but at the moment her responses are limited. You can invoke the HR department by typing 'lauren' in three consecutive messages in a Slack channel in which Qbot is already active (sort of how characters invoke a demon in the movie "Beetlejuice").

The end of 'home'

Twenty-five years ago, it was somewhat difficult for people to put personal content onto the web, so the ASF provided that feature for our committers. It was first known as people.apache.org and later as home.apache.org. Many ASF committers have made use of the service, and it currently holds several hundred gigabytes of data.

Today, there are so many options to host content that it no longer makes sense for the ASF to provide that service, and we will be turning "home" off around Thursday, September 12, 2024. We ask that anyone with content on the service to log in and download the data they want to preserve. For more information, see You can't go home again.

Roundtable summary

The August Roundtable discussed the informal group that is figuring out how to manage the repository for ASF-approved GitHub Actions, and what that group can provide as a model for other task-focused groups within the ASF. After discussing ideas covering practical questions and formal recognition, those present agreed that the wisest course was probably to proceed as a working group rather than trying to create a formal structure like a TLP. Notes on the conversation are available at Infra Roundtable 2024-08-07.

The next Roundtable will be September 4, 2024, 1200UTC, with a focus on what barriers or challenges projects whose members are primarily in Asia or Australia meet in ASF infrastructure. Details about joining the Roundtable are here.

More next month!