title: Inside Infra July 2024 
date: '2024-07-22' 
permalink: newsletter0724
layout: post 

Welcome to _Inside Infra_ for July, 2024.

## Qbot can help you on Slack

The Infrastructure team's Qbot is a Slack assistant that can simplify both important and frivolous tasks on Slack channels in the the-asf workspace. It can support requests in channels for PMCs, ASF committees, the ASF Board and ASF members.

The name references the tool-maker 'Q', who provides weapons and gadgets for Agent 007 in the James Bond movies.

### Qbot has an evolving set of functions:
  - Providing to the channel notifications related to your project's Jira tickets - new ticket, new comment, ticket resolved.
  - Adding people to private channels.
  - Starting a question queue in the huddle in a channel workspace (note that this feature is in alpha development).

It also has a set of 'fun' features, such as rolling dice or flipping a coin.

To learn more, visit <a href="https://infra.apache.org/qbot.html" target="_blank">Qbot</a>.

## Roundtable summary

The July Roundtable focused on managing the new <a href="https://github.com/apache/infrastructure-actions" target="_blank">GitHub repo for approved GitHub Actions developed by the ASF community</a>. The goal is to make it easy for a developer to add an Action to the repo as a pull request, and, after Infra verifies it, easy for any project to access and use it in its repositories.

A lively discussion covered topics such as:

  - Should the Actions be versioned, so people can easily get the version they want?
  - Who reviews and approves submitted Actions (at the moment, it is the Infra team, but the ideal would be a team of volunteers with GHA expertise).
  - There should be clear guidelines to writing an Action that will be acceptable.

If you have suggestions to help with the management of the repo and the Actions, please add it to <a href="https://github.com/apache/infrastructure-ideas/tree/main" target="_blank">Infra's 'good ideas' repo</a> , where others can easily comment on or extend the suggestion.

There is also a Slack channel in the 'the-asf' workspace, <i>asf-ghactions</i>, where discussion is continuing about Actions and the management of the repo. To join in, request that Infra add you to the channel.

The complete notes of the meeting are at <a href="https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/INFRA/Infra+Roundtable+2024-07-03%2C+17%3A00+UTC" target="_blank">Infra Roundtable 2024-07-03, 17:00 UTC</a>.

The next Roundtable will be **August 7, 2024, 1700UTC**. Using the team working on the new repository for ASF GitHub Actions as an example, we will discuss developing a **task community**.

More next month!
