Open Stack

Hi everyone,

TL;DR:
IRC meetings list now lives at http://eavesdrop.openstack.org
ical file with meetings is now at
http://eavesdrop.openstack.org/irc-meetings.ical

Long version:

I'm very pleased to announce that we solved a long-standing pain in how
we organize the IRC meetings agenda.

We used to change a wiki page, and then a human had to notice and pick
up the change, check for conflicts and (if all goes well) add it
manually to the iCal. There were a number of back-and-forth as people
kept on suggesting weird recurrence rules or non-UTC times. That was a
generally painful, error-prone process which I used to do, and that Tony
Breeds was kind enough to take over last cycle.

We have wanted to replace this system with a Gerrit-driven automation
for a long time. The meetings description and schedule would live as a
set of YAML files in a git repository, with a specific format to limit
errors. New meetings or meeting changes would be proposed in Gerrit, and
check/gate tests would make sure that there aren't any conflict. Humans
would just check that the change looks legit, and post-job automation
would take care of updating the iCal and the HTML list of meetings.

This started as a student project at NDSU driven by Lance Bragstad. It
was never really finished though, so I ended up picking up the pieces.
During a work session at the summit in Vancouver last week, the
Infrastructure team pushed the last bits, and it is now live.

It is now two things:

openstack-infra/yaml2ical
This is the Python library piece that generates ical (as well as a
templated meeting index) from a set of YAML descriptions, checking for
conflicts

openstack-infra/irc-meetings
This is the list of OpenStack IRC meetings and the template we use for
the index

The resulting index file is now posted at:
http://eavesdrop.openstack.org
Yes, it is pretty ugly. Feel free to suggest improvements to the
template! It lives as meetingindex.jinja in the irc-meetings repo.

The resulting iCal file is now posted at:
http://eavesdrop.openstack.org/irc-meetings.ical
Please update your calendar application(s) as we'll discontinue usage of
the old one very soon.

For future meeting additions and schedule modifications, please propose
changes to openstack-infra/irc-meetings via Gerrit !

The old wiki page at https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Meetings now
redirects to the new system.

Thanks to everyone involved for making this possible. Let's keep on
automating the boring tasks !

-- 
Thierry Carrez (ttx)