Intent to start ARC investigation.

Hello, Fedora community,

Following on from the Fedora Council's decision to investigate Forgejo and GitLab as potential replacements[1], the Community Platform Engineering team will start an ARC[2] investigation to compare proposed alternatives for current pagure use cases. The council has defined some broad requirements for the team to consider during this investigation. But we would like inputs from all gitforge user groups in our community. So, if you have a specific use case or workflow, share it with us in the form of a user story in this ticket[6], or consider joining the ARC team for this investigation.

High-level overview of investigation requirements by the council:

1. Suitability for dist-git and src.fedoraproject.org replacement

2. Suitability for replacement of Bugzilla for packaging issues and review process

3. Suitability for replacement of Pagure and Bugzilla for release issues (change process, blocker bugs, etc)
* https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA:SOP_blocker_bug_process
* https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA:SOP_freeze_exception_bug_process

4. Suitability for replacement of Pagure for SIG and Team ticket tracking (e.g. FESCo tracker)

5. Cost of hosting and maintenance (hardware + time and resources from CPE and wider infrastructure team)

6. Ease of migration from current Pagure, GitHub, and GitLab

7. Ease of extension and enhancement — can we improve things ourselves to add missing features/features that are cool and useful like CI integration?

8. New features like Asciidoc support, Online editor, and others to make things easier for the Fedora teams and their workflows.

9. Estimate Future risk for Fedora project and Infrastructure team
1. Long-term project vision
2. Platform SMEs in the Fedora Infrastructure team and the wider community

These requirements do not represent feature sets, but rather a high-level overview of our current use cases.
CPE has already done some initial mapping of how our current applications interact with distgit[3] and if we have missed anything, please let folks know in a thread on discussions.fp.o[4].

The aim of this investigation will not be to pick one solution or the other,
but instead, focus on providing the Fedora Council and decision makers[5] with an extensive comparison of the two.

For discussion about the purpose of this investigation please use the discussions.fp.o thread[7]

The ARC investigation will commence in early May.

[1] - https://communityblog.fedoraproject.org/2024-git-forge-evaluation/
[2] - https://fedora-arc.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html
[3] - https://fedora-arc.readthedocs.io/en/latest/dist-git-move/index.html#interactions
[4] - https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/dist-git-decoupling-investigation/93644/10
[5] - https://pagure.io/Fedora-Council/tickets/issue/488
[6] - https://pagure.io/fedora-infra/arc/issue/164
[7] - https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/arc-git-forge-investigation/114018

Tomas Hrcka
Cat herder at Community Platform Engineering team