Get Jenkins Infrastructure to use for building and deploying pyRACF to pypi.org

[lcarcaramo]

We do not want to have to manually build and upload pyRACF to pypi.org. We need access to some Jenkins infrastructure somewhere where we can automate the build and deployment of pyRACF releases.

[VivekKamisetty]

Hi @lcarcaram, I am interested in working on this issue. Could you please elaborate the issue, so that I could get a better understanding regarding the issue.

[lcarcaramo]

Hi @VivekKamisetty, I am happy to see that you are interested in contributing to the pyRACF project!

To elaborate further on the requirements of this issue, we would like to have a Jenkins server that is publicly visible (like a GitHub Actions/Travis workflow) and a z/OS Jenkins build agent that we can connect to from that publicly visible Jenkins server. The idea is that as an open source project, this would provide better visibility into our full CI/CD process. Currently, we do have GitHub Actions workflows that run unit tests, linting and other things that are able to run off platform, but currently we have to run the function tests and the build and deployment on our systems inside the IBM firewall since industry standard CI/CD tools like GitHub Actions and Travis do not provide z/OS build agents.

If you are able to acquire and dedicate resources on a publicly visible Jenkins server along with a z/OS build agent that can be accessed from that Jenkins server, that would be something we would consider pursuing. Otherwise, if you are still interested in contributing to the pyRACF project, there are other things we need help with.

As you might have noticed, pyRACF development has slowed since early this year. This is because we are working on a new project that will coming to Ambitus (likely early 2025, but possibly earlier) that will impact pyRACF (in a positive way, but will require significant backend code changes).

While we are working on this new project, one thing that could be done in parallel would be the creation of Jinja templates to simplify the management of our GitHub pages documentation: https://github.com/ambitus/pyracf/tree/gh-pages.

The main benefit of this is that the Jinja templates will handle all of the Markdown formatting nuances and define our documentation using a standardized Jinja template.

If you have any other ideas, let us know.

Ultimately, if you are interested in contributing to the pyRACF project at all, I encourage you to join the System Z Enthusiasts discord server as a place where we can collaborate on pyRACF: https://discord.com/servers/system-z-enthusiasts-880322471608344597

Also please provide your discord ID so that we can get you added to our Discord channel.

[lcarcaramo]

We will investigate getting a publicly facing development environment for CI/CD through the IBM z/OS Open-Source Development, Test and CI/CD Pipeline program.