Cdnjs: Lack of cdnjs activity

[eastling]

Hello, it seems the last commit is in 17days ago. Why there is no commit recently?

[MattIPv4]

Long story super short:

• Founder restricted access heavily so we (core maintainers) cannot do much at all
• Founder disappeared off the face of the earth and we heard nothing
• We (core maintainers) raised this internally and asked it be sorted
• Nothing was sorted, so @PeterDaveHello has quit maintaining the project
  
  
  
  • As part of this, they appear to have disabled our updating automation (I disagree with this action, it harms the existing users of the service)
  
  

We have an on-going internal discussion to get this resolved but this is the current state of affairs, nothing has really progressed since we (core maintainers) first raised the access issue internally in late September.

Key immediate issues:

• Auto-update bot is offline
• Core maintainers do not have merge access in this repo (cdnjs/cdnjs)
• Core maintainers do not have merge access (preferably admin access) to other repos in org
  
  
  
  • Such as cdnjs/new-website
  
  

Key long-term issues:

• Current repo structure is not maintainable
  
  
  
  • Repo is extremely large and a pain to work with locally
  
  
  • Whilst the CI on PRs is good, it requires human intervention still
  
  
• Auto-update/CI bot lacks some important functionality
  
  
  
  • Set of issues opened around this: 🤖 PeterBot
  
  
• No direct financial sponsorship (or any funding) for core maintainers to work on cdnjs

Update 1:

I reached out again to the founder in question yesterday (October 20th) to see if we can get any progress as we have both Microsoft (in #13500) and Greensock [GSAP] (in my Twitter DMs), who are both "big players", asking what's going on.

I actually got a response that they're going to sort something so that we (core maintainers) at least have access to merge PRs in this repo, nothing more though so far...

Update 2:

We (core maintainers) now (October 22nd) have access to merge PRs on cdnjs/cdnjs but the auto-update bot is still offline (as was originally described in this issue), so merging new and updated package.json PRs will achieve nothing as there is no bot to detect them and pull in new assets. We are still working internally to resolve this.

Update 3:

I followed up internally again on the 29th October regarding the two current key issues (auto-update & repo access). This issue has then made it to the front page of HackerNews (1st November) and still there has not been any progress internally, just radio silence. I'm really sorry we haven't got this sorted yet. :(

Update 4:

One of our founders has reappeared and granted Cloudflare full owner access to the cdnjs org to get things fixed. I believe that Cloudflare are going to have one of their engineers work to get things back up and running again. You can see the full comment from Zack below: https://github.com/cdnjs/cdnjs/issues/13524#issuecomment-548893758

[olafcm]

Thank you for your update on this issue, @MattIPv4.
Since the auto-update bot is offline, none of the libs we use are updated. Any progress on the issue?
Thanks!

[MattIPv4]

No progress since the last update to the above message, which I plan to keep updated with the latest. I'll follow up internally later today about getting auto-updating back working and getting us (core maintainers) proper admin access to all our repos.

[gruselhaus]

@MattIPv4 any progress?

[MattIPv4]

I've followed up internally about the outstanding issues, haven't heard anything more though.

As a general note, pinging me for updates isn't need, I will keep the post at the top updated with the latest :)

[jimaek]

Let me know if the jsDelivr team can help in any way

[MattIPv4]

@jimaek with the little access & control that I have, I'm not sure that there is currently much we can do.

Though, if we ever do reach a point where we have the access needed, it may be an idea to consider simply creating a worker on cdnjs.cloudflare.com that maps traffic to jsDelivr, to put an end to this mess.

[jimaek]

That's an option of course. But we can also provide developer time for free to help out and ensure there is no impact to any users. Just ping me

[aditsachde]

I'm not really sure how any of the internal infrastructure works, but has there been an attempt to contact Cloudflare? The assets are served from a Cloudflare domain, so they might be able to help out with creating a worker and remapping traffic to jsDelivr, without commit access to all the repos or the bot.

[MattIPv4]

Yes, I could potentially work with Cloudflare to deploy such a worker, though this would be an absolute last resort thing and not something I really want to do unless we deciede that cdnjs is completely dead, which is not a call that has been made yet.

[zackbloom]

I work at Cloudflare on the team which supports CDNJS. To be very clear, any site using CDNJS will continue to get the files it relies on without interruption. We're committed to keeping CDNJS updated, performant, and reliable, for as long as the Internet chooses to use it.

We have engineers currently working with the CDNJS team to get the updating happening again. Once that is completed we can start thinking about the best long-term model to ensure projects stay updated without another incident like this. We deeply appreciate the patience and help from the CDNJS team, the users of CDNJS, and of course @MattIPv4, as this gets sorted.

[drewfreyling]

Thanks @zackbloom and @MattIPv4 - let me know if I can be of assistance with any of the development effort.

[PeterDaveHello]

Sorry for the inconvenience caused here, never mean to harm the project or Cloudflare.

It's really a ... hard decision to make to step down and take a rest, on a project I spent so much time and varies of resources on it, actually, I'm a little bit tired, too many things need to be done, resources are really limited, only few contributors get involved into it, instead, so many people take it as granted ...

Anyway, yes, we're working with Cloudflare right now to see how we can get it sorted, I hope it won't take too long.

[zackbloom]

Thank you @PeterDaveHello. We all deeply appreciate all the time and effort you have put into CDNJS over the past few years, it is an amazing thing to go back through the commits and see just how much you have done.

[mrlife]

Thank you for providing CDNJS. Any update on the auto-update bot coming online? Not sure whether to keep waiting or shift to another CDN solution.

https://github.com/DataTables/DataTablesSrc/issues/153

[MattIPv4]

The old auto-update bot is online and running. You can see that in the commit activity on the repo. We are still working on figuring out the best plan for a rewrite of the auto-update bot.

[mrlife]

@MattIPv4 Thanks for letting me know. When will tagged releases start being picked up, e.g. DataTables 1.10.20?

[MattIPv4]

Looks like that was published quite a while back - I would guess that the file structure has changed or another issue has occurred with the auto-update of it that means manual intervention will be needed. Please create a separate issue requesting the library is updated here.