#infrastructures Charter and FAQ

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Topic

The #infrastructures IRC channel is there to discuss things related to infrastructures -- most particularly computing infrastructures, and management of same, as exemplified by the Infrastructures.org web site. But that does not and should not exclude the other infrastructures which make up our daily substrate -- organizational, personal, family, financial, economic, political... after all, this is IRC. Pretty much the only things that should really be considered "off topic" are accusations of something being "off topic".

"Officially" hosted at irc.infrastructures.org

Officially, the channel is hosted at irc.infrastructures.org -- which may or may not be a CNAME to, for instance, irc.openirc.net. This CNAME might change on short notice any day due to the whims and storms of the IRC world, so it's safer to set irc.infrastructures.org in your IRC client as the server name. If you do use the actual network name (to deal with nick duplication issues, for instance), and find the channel evaporating, go back and see if we've moved the CNAME to somewhere else.

Logging of channel traffic

At this time we state no explicit policy regarding logging -- IRC convention and etiquette applies. Log things for yourself, for instance, and quote juicy bits on your blog with permission from the authors. We've discussed having an "official" web-based log, crawlable by google, and while there are good arguments both for and against, we haven't reached a strong consensus either way.

"Is this the ISconf channel, or can I talk about something else?"

See the Topic section, above.

This question often arises on the channel. It's a valid question, because the founders of infrastructures.org are among the original authors of isconf, and the channel's founder is isconf's primary maintainer, so he tends to have it on his mind. Here's more detail than you ever wanted to know:

ISconf is a reference implementation of the things we try to describe
on the infrastructures.org web site.  At any given time, the text on
the site lags the code by quite a bit -- years, in some cases.  Even
the "bootstrapping" paper itself was a description of past successes;
if we had tried to actually document for other sysadmins what we were
about to do, we would have been shot down, hard, for trying to do
such silly things, the work itself would never have been done, and
that paper, and the web site, would not exist today.  

So, at least for the time being, trying to separate
infrastructures.org and isconf is sort of an oxymoron -- they are the
same body of code, in two different languages, with a painfully large
version offset between them.

We know that the "right thing" to reduce this offset is to migrate the
entire infrastructures.org site into a wiki with source code
repository and tickets so we can come up with real standards,
including design patterns and anti-patterns, and legitimately claim
that the whole ball of wax is truly the product of the community.  The
need to make short-term income is the only thing that has kept me from
taking the time to do this migration.  

The whole point of all of this work is to try to discover the science
of systems administration, and make our lives easier by applying it.
I don't claim that isconf is the only tool that can do this.  But I
would say that some of the best "learning experience" debates we've
had in the infrastructures.org crowd, both on list and in person, have
come from people talking about how isconf works or should work, not so
much because they are using it, but because, after all, that's one of
the things reference implementations are for.  At their root, these
debates are our attempts to understand what it is we're all trying to
do.

-- Steve Traugott