Re: [gentoo-project] Call for agenda items - Council meeting 2016-08-14

[Pallav Agarwal <pallavagarwal07@gmail.com>]

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On Tue, Aug 9, 2016 at 8:11 PM, Brian Dolbec <dolsen@gentoo.org> wrote:

> On Tue, 9 Aug 2016 22:05:45 +1200
> Kent Fredric <kentnl@gentoo.org> wrote:
>
> > On Tue, 9 Aug 2016 01:59:35 -0400
> > Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org> wrote:
> >
> > > While I think your proposal is a great one, I think this is actually
> > > the biggest limitation.  A lot of our packages (most?) don't
> > > actually have tests that can be run on every build (most don't have
> > > tests, some have tests that take forever to run or can't be used on
> > > a clean install).
> >
> > IMHO, That's not "ideal", but we don't need idealism to be useful
> > here.
> >
> > Tests passing give one kind of useful kind of quality test.
> >
> > But "hey, it compiles" gives useful data in itself.
> >
> > By easy counter example, "it doesn't compile" is in itself useful
> > information ( and the predominant supply of bugs filed are compilation
> > failures ).
> >
> > Hell, sometimes I hit a compile failure and I just go "eeh, I'll look
> > into it next week". How many people are doing the same?
> >
> > The beauty of the automated datapoint is it doesn't have to be
> > "awesome quality" to be useful, its just guidance for further
> > investigation.
> > > While runtime testing doesn't HAVE to be extensive, we do want
> > > somebody to at least take a glance at it.
> >
> > Indeed, I'm not hugely in favour of abolishing manual stabilization
> > entirely, but sometimes it just gets to a point where its a bit beyond
> > a joke with requests languishing untouched for months.
> >
> > If there was even data saying "hey, look, its obvious this isn't ready
> > for stabilization", we could *remove* or otherwise mark for
> > postponement stabilization requests that were failing due to
> > crowd-source metrics.
> >
> > This means it can also be used to focus existing stabilization efforts
> > to reduce the number of things being thrown in the face of manual
> > stabilizers.
> >
> > >
> > > If everything you're proposing is just on top of what we're already
> > > doing, then we have the issue that people aren't keeping up with the
> > > current workload, and even if that report is ultra-nice it is
> > > actually one more step than we have today.  The workload would only
> > > go down if a machine could look at the report and stabilize things
> > > without input at least some of the time.
> >
> > Indeed, it would require the crowd service to be automated, and the
> > relevant usage of the data as automated as possible, and humans would
> > only go looking at the data when interested.
> >
> > For instance, when somebody manually files a stable request, some
> > watcher could run off and scour the reports in a given window and
> > comment "Warning: Above threshold failure rates for target in last
> > n-days, proceed with caution", and it would only enhance the existing
> > stabilization workflow.
>
> This whole thing you are proposing has been a past stats project many
> times in GSOC for Gentoo.  The last time, it produced a decent system
> that was functional and __NEVER__ got deployed and turned on.  It ran
> for several years on the gentoo GSOC student server (vulture).  It
> never gained traction with the infra team due to lack of infra
> resources and infra personnel to maintain it.
>
> Perhaps with the new hardware recently purchased to replace the failed
> server from earlier this year, we should have some hardware resources.
> If you can dedicate some time to work on the code which I'm sure will
> need some updating now, I would help as well (not that I already can't
> keep up with all the project coding I'm involved with).
>
> This is of course if we can get a green light from our infra team to be
> able to implement a stats vm on the new ganeti system.
>
> We will also need some help from security people to ensure the system
> is secure, nginx/lightttp configuration, etc...
>
> So, are you up for it?  Any Gentoo dev willing to help admin such a
> system, please reply with your area of expertise and ability to help.
>
> Maybe we can finally get a working and deployed stats system.
>
> --
> Brian Dolbec <dolsen>
>
>
The similar GSoC project this year is in fact my project, named
[Continuous Stabilization]. I would be very interested to know what I
can do to ensure that the system is deployed and used this time.

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