LibreOffice Community Infrastructure – TDF’s Annual Report 2022
In 2022, the infrastructure team deployed a second web-based alternative to mailing lists, and upgraded many services
(This is part of The Document Foundation’s Annual Report for 2022 – we’ll post the full version here soon.)
LibreOffice’s infrastructure team is responsible for maintaining the hardware, virtual machines and services that enable the wider community to develop, market, test, localize and improve the software.
For some years, the public infrastructure has been powered by kernel-based virtual machines (KVMs) spread across four hypervisors hosted at Manitu in St. Wendel (Germany), and managed by TDF. This setup served well in the past, but started showing age and arguably no longer met the community’s growing needs. In 2022, the decision was made to migrate about half of the virtual machines (roughly 30) to Hetzner, using a mix of real hosts and virtual machines located in Nuremberg, Falkenstein, and Nuremberg. Among the migrated services are many production services such as Gerrit, Bugzilla, Mediawiki, Discourse and Nextcloud instances.
Our infra team also deployed a second Discourse site to be used for discussion in addition to (or in lieu of) mailing lists. A web-based discussion platform has long been requested by community members who compared to the early day of the project are less keen to use e-mail for everything. Several teams have requested migrated existing mailing lists to the new platform.
On the backend front, our infra team continued with the upgrade of our Debian GNU/Linux machines to version 11 (codename “Bullseye”), and upgraded services following the respective upstream schedules (notably, Gerrit was upgraded to branch 3.6, Weblate to 4.11, Discourse to 2.8, and Redmine to 4.2).