[Piuparts-devel] piatti xen setup

[Lars Wirzenius]

First, my apologizes for the slow response. I've been swamped with
things lately.

la, 2007-09-22 kello 10:35 +0200, Holger Levsen kirjoitti:
> piatti.debian.org is a dual-core amd64 machine hosted at the University of 
> Helsinki, dedicated to run piuparts. It has a debian mirror and used to run 
> piuparts in an endless loop, making the results available at 
> http://piatti.debian.org/
> 
> The "new" idea is to turn the machine into a xen host, where developers can 
> create xen domU instances to run piuparts for some packages (and destroy 
> those domU instances after usage), and probably have one domU instance 
> running piuparts all over the archive in an endless loop again.

I've never set up Xen, and I know very little about it, so I don't have
any real opinions on that part. I like the general thrust of making it
easier for any Debian developer (or trusted other parties, for all I
care) to run QA stuff on beefier hardware than most have access to at
home.

Holger has been talking about piuparts only; I suggest things not be
limited to that, since other tools may also be useful. For example,
having someone set up regular runs of vlosuts on piatti to test various
upgrade scenarios would not just be nice, it would be insanely great.
(Maybe something like stable to testing upgrades for a basic system, a
GNOME desktop, a KDE desktop, and a fairly fully configured server.)

I think that if Lucas can continue to run archive-wide piuparts tests it
makes a lot of sense to use piatti for something else.

Incidentally, the Univ. of Helsinki originally asked us to use the name
piuparts.cs.helsinki.fi when referring to it, so that they get that
little bit of recognition in exchange for hosting it.

Another thing that might be nice to use piatti for is development of
piuparts and other QA tools. Back when I developed piuparts, I spent a
lot of time just waiting for test runs to complete.

-- 
Never underestimate the power of a small tactical Lisp interpreter.