[Piuparts-devel] draft for mail to d-d-a

[Holger Levsen]

Hi,

I plan to send this out soon. Please review and comment! Thanks already!

To: debian-devel-annouce at lists.debian.org
Subject: Bits from the piuparts maintainers

Hi,

I thought it's been a long time since the last bits from the piuparts
maintainers on debian-devel-announce, but actually it's seems this is a first
time! And this pretty good sums up the main news: I'm happy to announce that
piuparts is again maintained by a team and thus have closed the RFH #584125.

Running piuparts.debian.org is still maintainance hungry, but the last months 
have seen lots of patches and other contributions, including bug filings based 
on the tests results, which is awesome! Please keep it coming!

If you have no idea what piuparts is: it's a tool for testing that .deb
packages can be installed, upgraded, and removed without problems. The testing
results are published on http://piuparts.debian.org daily.


Before telling more news, I have two requests to everybody maintaining    
packages in Debian: (and which are kinda news too)

- please check your personal status pages. Every maintainer/uploader
  has one (or up to five! One for each distro being tested.) Mine is at
 
  http://piuparts.debian.org/sid/maintainer/h/holger@debian.org.html
  
  please go and check yours. Regularily. And fix these issues! And thank you 
  if you already do this! :-)

- please file bugs, if you see them. If the bug is also detected on
  piuparts.debian.org, please usertag it! In short:

   User: debian-qa at lists.debian.org
   Usertags: piuparts

  Verbose instructions, including templates, for filing piuparts bugs are
  available:
 
  http://piuparts.debian.org/bug_howto.html


Since December 2011 a new "distro" is being tested: squeeze2wheezy, which means
upgrade tests for individual packages, installed on Squeeze and then upgraded to
Wheezy. After a month of testing this lead to a nice graph which can be seen on:

 http://piuparts.debian.org/squeeze2wheezy/

In words: 33708 passed logs, 158 failed, 130 in state dependency-failed-testing. 
In wheezy it's about the same, but only 90 failed, so there are still some 
upgrade issues to iron out.

Comparing the overall test results for wheezy and squeez2wheezy with squeeze
and lenny2squeeze is also interesting. And the way forward is to file and fix
bugs, obviously! :-D

There are a lot more packages in failing state for sid. For the other distros, 
the test for leaving files behind after purge is ignored, to catch more 
severe problems. In sid, this is also treated as an important failure, causing
dependent packages not to be tested.

A goal should be, to have no failed (and thus unfiled) logs for wheezy and 
squeeze2wheezy tests on piuparts.debian.org at the time of the wheezy freeze, 
aka June 2012! Please help to reach this goal! Either by filing or fixing bugs!


Since DebConf11, piuparts is maintained in git and since then contributing by
providing feature/bugfix branches is the prefered form.

 git clone git+ssh://git.debian.org/git/piuparts/piuparts.git


This has also lead to new uploads:

- 0.42 has been released on Decemeber 23rd 2011 and reached wheezy a while ago,
  containing many improvements from four months of development.
- 0.43 released on January 22nd, 2012, after just a month of development.
  In this release /run/.* was added to self.ignored_patterns, bringing the 
  released version of piuparts back in line with current Debian development.


Finally, there is a new mailinglist, piuparts-reports, which receives mails 
from the master/slave setup running on piatti.debian.org, thus making it 
possible to follow, debug and improve this service more easily:

 http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/piuparts-reports


Please check the file TODO in the sources for plans for further changes coming 
hopefully soon! And thanks for reading this far and helping Debian quality 
assurance!


cheers,
        Holger
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