After my ranting about QA – which brought back our lead from hiding, at least for a while, let’s see how he fares this time – a number of people asked me what they could do to help QA improve. Given that we want both to test and prevent, here comes a list of desirable features and requests that could obviously be helpful:
- as usual, providing for another tinderbox would be a good thing as more situations could be tested; right now I’d very much like to have a server powerful enough to run a parallel tinderbox set up to test against stable-tree amd64 keyword, rather than the current unstable x86;
repomanright now does not warn about network errors inHOMEPAGEorSRC_URI; see this bug as for why; it would be a good thing to have;- again
repoman, lacking network checks, lack a way to make sure that the herd specified inmetadata.xmlexists at all; it’s pretty important to do that since it happened before that herds weren’t updated at all; - there is also no way to ensure that
metadata.xmllists maintainers that have accounts in Bugzilla; with proxy-maintainership sometime it happens that either the email address is not properly updated (proxier fail) or the maintainer does not have an account on Bugzilla at all (which is against the rules!); unfortunately this requires login-access to bugzilla, and is thus a no-no right now; - the
files/subdirectories are still a problem for the tree, especially since they are synced down to all users and should, thus, be kept slim, if not for the critical packages; as it turns out, between Samba and PostgreSQL they use over half a megabyte for files that a lot of people wouldn’t be using at all; we also had trouble with people not understanding that the 20KB size limit on files does not mean you can split it in two 10KB files, nor compress it to keep it in tree (beside the fact we’re using CVS, there is a separate patch repository for that; Robin is working on providing a reliable patch tarball hosting as well); see bug #274853 and bug #274868 - moving on to bugzilla, there is currently no way to display inline on the browser logs that are compressed with gzip, that the new Portage can generate and make the tinderbox work much easier; this makes bug reports a bit more complex to manage; if somebody knows how to get Bugzilla to provide proper headers so that the browsers can read them, it’d be pure magic;
- right now we lack a decent way to test for automagic dependencies; you could make use of something similar to my oneliner but it won’t consider transitive dependencies on virtual packages;
- with split-unsplit-split-unsplit cycles, it happens that a number of packages are in tree and are now obsoleted – this is why I had to remove a number of geda ebuilds the other day – removing these packages not only reduces the pressure on the tree itself, but also allows the tinderbox to run much more smoothly without me having to mask those packages manually: when they are visible, the tinderbox might end up trying to merge them by removing the (newer) un-split ebuild, or vice-versa;
- one more Portage (non-repoman!) feature that would be nice: per-package features or at least per-package maintainer mode while Portage has a number of features to make sure that maintainers don’t commit crap (testsuite support; die-on-some-warnings; fix-or-die) – such as the
stricterfeature – but using them system-wide is unfeasible (I’m okay with fixing my own stuff, but I don’t want an unusable system because some other developer didn’t fix his).