[gentoo-dev] Keywording, for the umpteenth time

[gentoo-dev] Keywording, for the umpteenth time

[Jason Wever]

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OK, let's review this again.

If you cannot test a given ebuild on a given arch, then don't touch that 
arch's keyword (unless you need to remove it for broken dependencies).

If you can test for a given arch and are not part of that arch team, 
please please please let the arch teams know that before you go around 
keywording things arbitrarily.  It makes the baby Jesus cry when you don't 
and really isn't the greatest from a QA perspective either.

Maintaining almost all of the packages in the portage tree is a demanding 
job, but it is what we as architecture teams do.  Please respect 
architecture keywording like you were trying to make changes to a package 
someone else maintains.

Thanks,
- -- 
Jason Wever
Gentoo/Sparc Co-Team Lead
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Re: [gentoo-dev] Keywording, for the umpteenth time

[Duncan Coutts]

On Fri, 2005-05-20 at 10:42 -0600, Jason Wever wrote:
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> OK, let's review this again.
> 
> If you cannot test a given ebuild on a given arch, then don't touch that 
> arch's keyword (unless you need to remove it for broken dependencies).
> 
> If you can test for a given arch and are not part of that arch team, 
> please please please let the arch teams know that before you go around 
> keywording things arbitrarily.  It makes the baby Jesus cry when you don't 
> and really isn't the greatest from a QA perspective either.

Sorry folks this was my fault. I've sent my grovelling apology to the
sparc team. Hopefully they'll accept my apologies and put my digressions
down to me being a new dev. :-)

Actually I did do fairly thorough testing / QA but I didn't tell the
arch team before keywording (bad me!).

In case anyone is interested; this is about the Haskell packages which I
hope to get up to scratch on sparc (with the consent and approval of the
sparc team in future!)

Duncan

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Keywording, for the umpteenth time

[Mike Frysinger]

On Friday 20 May 2005 02:53 pm, Duncan Coutts wrote:
> Sorry folks this was my fault.

ah, good to know ... thought it might have been my binutils-2.16 ~sparc 
marking, but i guess that's somewhat sane since Weeve gave it a quick run and 
it seems to be OK thus far ...
-mike
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Re: [gentoo-dev] Keywording, for the umpteenth time

[Jason Wever]

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On Fri, 20 May 2005, Duncan Coutts wrote:

> Sorry folks this was my fault. I've sent my grovelling apology to the
> sparc team. Hopefully they'll accept my apologies and put my digressions
> down to me being a new dev. :-)

You can only take some of the credit Duncan, but not all of it :)

Every once and a while it seems a reminder such as this is needed as 
people tend to start playing with package keywords when they shouldn't be. 
It's kind of like guarding the cookie jar, you can't ever let your guard 
down, even if you cut off everyone else's hands.  I try not to point 
fingers or name names since it's not something I like done to myself.  I'd 
also like to think that this gives such guilty parties a better 
understanding of why the arch teams (and especially SPARC) can be so 
maniacal about this sometimes, in hopes that it will lessen and/or prevent 
this problem in the future.

>From my perspective, if a package maintainer asks for testing and the 
ability to keyword (i.e. Spanky asking me if it was OK to bump binutils to 
2.16, to which I said yes) then that is fine.  However adding or changing 
keywords in an ebuild for which you cannot test (regardless of how trivial 
the changes are or how "portable" the programming language of said package 
is supposed to be) is really where I'm looking at here.

For some odd reason, trying to ensure QA (even in the nicest of fashions) 
seems to result in a majority of less than positive responses.  Even 
recently I've had a developer get quite confrontational with me over email 
when I nicely asked him not to stabilize packages for which he could not 
test (even if the changes were supposedly trivial).  History has shown 
that we cannot depend on assuming that trivial changes for me == works for 
you if we want to have some level of Q in QA.

Cheers,
- -- 
Jason Wever
Gentoo/Sparc Co-Team Lead
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Re: [gentoo-dev] Keywording, for the umpteenth time

[Brian Jackson]

Jason Wever wrote:
<snip>
> 
> From my perspective, if a package maintainer asks for testing and the
> ability to keyword (i.e. Spanky asking me if it was OK to bump binutils
> to 2.16, to which I said yes) then that is fine.  However adding or
> changing keywords in an ebuild for which you cannot test (regardless of
> how trivial the changes are or how "portable" the programming language
> of said package is supposed to be) is really where I'm looking at here.

Wouldn't it be better from a QA perspective to go back to the (really) old
policy of dropping anything you can't test on. I know that puts more work on you
guys, but this is only going to get worse as we get more devs. Wouldn't it be
better to nip this in the bud now. Maybe broaden the arch teams by giving some
devs access to remote boxes.

--Or--

Get every dev access to all the supported arches (some of this could probably be
done with emulators of some sort, qemu or somesuch). Make them test on every
arch before they change any keywords.

--Iggy

> 
> For some odd reason, trying to ensure QA (even in the nicest of
> fashions) seems to result in a majority of less than positive
> responses.  Even recently I've had a developer get quite confrontational
> with me over email when I nicely asked him not to stabilize packages for
> which he could not test (even if the changes were supposedly trivial). 
> History has shown that we cannot depend on assuming that trivial changes
> for me == works for you if we want to have some level of Q in QA.
> 
> Cheers,
> - -- Jason Wever
> Gentoo/Sparc Co-Team Lead

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Keywording, for the umpteenth time

[Michael Cummings]

On Friday 20 May 2005 16:51, Brian Jackson wrote:
>
> Get every dev access to all the supported arches (some of this could
> probably be done with emulators of some sort, qemu or somesuch). Make them
> test on every arch before they change any keywords.

It's a nice idea (I know I recently opened "negotiations" up with the mips 
team for access so I could close some of my open bugs against them), but the 
two problems I can see with this are: remote access tends to mean you can't 
test any X related properly (shoot, I have a sparc sitting next to me 
headless, but being headless I never broach the gui related sparc stuff), and 
ultimately, that kind of open ended freedom will still result in people 
marking things ~arch and arch that they shouldn't be - maybe they rushed and 
just made sure it installed, not really worked, or they figure they can 
always go back later if they see any bugs.

Man, when did I become the dour note?

-- 
-----o()o---------------------------------------------
Michael Cummings   |    #gentoo-dev, #gentoo-perl
Gentoo Perl Dev    |    on irc.freenode.net 
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Re: [gentoo-dev] Keywording, for the umpteenth time

[Ciaran McCreesh]

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On Fri, 20 May 2005 15:51:51 -0500 Brian Jackson <iggy@gentoo.org>
wrote:
| Wouldn't it be better from a QA perspective to go back to the (really)
| old policy of dropping anything you can't test on. I know that puts
| more work on you guys, but this is only going to get worse as we get
| more devs. Wouldn't it be better to nip this in the bud now. Maybe
| broaden the arch teams by giving some devs access to remote boxes.

Not really. Dropping to ~arch when bumping works well. Sure, ~arch does
occasionally end up broken, but it's better than us lagging behind
massively. There're too many packages and not enough people these
days...

The assumption is, if foo-1.2 works on, say, sparc, then foo-1.3
probably will too to the extent that we're happy for it to go to ~sparc.
On the other hand, we're *not* confident enough in upstreams' abilities
to always put out perfect releases that we're prepared to move things to
stable without explicit testing.

See, we *really* don't want arch to get broken. We'd rather ~arch didn't
break either, of course, but taking the occasional hit there is
acceptable if it lets us keep everything up to date.

| Get every dev access to all the supported arches (some of this could
| probably be done with emulators of some sort, qemu or somesuch). Make
| them test on every arch before they change any keywords.

Not gonna happen. Emulators don't cut it and won't find all the problems
(but they will find a load of other bogus non-issues). Plus, from
experience I'd say that at least half our devs wouldn't have a clue
where to start when doing arch testing...

Then there's the issue of most alt-archs having far higher QA standards
than x86 anyway, and us not wanting to sink to what x86 considers
acceptable for marking stable.

From experience -- the current policy as it is now *works*, so long as
everyone follows it.

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh : Gentoo Developer (Vim, Shell tools, Fluxbox, Cron)
Mail            : ciaranm at gentoo.org
Web             : http://dev.gentoo.org/~ciaranm


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Re: [gentoo-dev] Keywording, for the umpteenth time

[Tom Wesley]

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On Fri, 2005-05-20 at 22:22 +0100, Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> Not gonna happen. Emulators don't cut it and won't find all the problems
> (but they will find a load of other bogus non-issues). Plus, from
> experience I'd say that at least half our devs wouldn't have a clue
> where to start when doing arch testing...

Add this HOWTO arch test to your developer docs.  Very nice by the way.

> Then there's the issue of most alt-archs having far higher QA standards
> than x86 anyway, and us not wanting to sink to what x86 considers
> acceptable for marking stable.
> 
> From experience -- the current policy as it is now *works*, so long as
> everyone follows it.

And as long as ciaranm, or someone from a non x86 arch bitches once a
month here.

-- 
Tom Wesley <tom@tomaw.org>

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Keywording, for the umpteenth time

[Ciaran McCreesh]

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On Fri, 20 May 2005 22:49:50 +0100 Tom Wesley <tom@tomaw.org> wrote:
| On Fri, 2005-05-20 at 22:22 +0100, Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
| > Not gonna happen. Emulators don't cut it and won't find all the
| > problems (but they will find a load of other bogus non-issues).
| > Plus, from experience I'd say that at least half our devs wouldn't
| > have a clue where to start when doing arch testing...
| 
| Add this HOWTO arch test to your developer docs.  Very nice by the
| way.

Could do. I intend to include sections for domain-specific and
task-specific tasks at some point. The Debian Policy Manual does this to
a certain extent -- they have sections on things like "what to do if
your app needs to install cron jobs", "what to do if your app installs
shared libraries", "Emacs lisp programs" and various others. I'm kinda
tinkering with the best way for us to do a similar thing. There've been
a few requests for an "X11 Apps" section in The Doc, for example.

I guess arch-specific commentary would be good too. Would anyone from
any of the arch teams that I don't work on be prepared to feed me with
information?

Of course, a lot of arch testing is still down to experience. As with
everything else, docs can help as a reference but they can't replace
skilled devs, nor can they replace having an arch team that actually
discusses things and coordinates keywording.

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh : Gentoo Developer (Vim, Shell tools, Fluxbox, Cron)
Mail            : ciaranm at gentoo.org
Web             : http://dev.gentoo.org/~ciaranm


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Re: [gentoo-dev] Keywording, for the umpteenth time

[Donnie Berkholz]

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Michael Cummings wrote:
> It's a nice idea (I know I recently opened "negotiations" up with the mips 
> team for access so I could close some of my open bugs against them), but the 
> two problems I can see with this are: remote access tends to mean you can't 
> test any X related properly (shoot, I have a sparc sitting next to me 
> headless, but being headless I never broach the gui related sparc stuff)

You might like to try Xvfb, Xvnc, etc., perhaps over nomachine if your
network connection isn't too quick and you actually want to see the app.
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