[Piuparts-devel] bits from the piuparts maintainers: the first million is the hardest

[Holger Levsen]

Hi!

About piuparts
--------------
piuparts [1] tests that .deb packages (as used by Debian) handle installation,
upgrading, and removal correctly. http://piuparts.debian.org runs it on whole
main Debian archive.

New hardware
------------

Last week together with the help from the fine DSA folks I moved
http://piuparts.debian.org away from the machine piatti.debian.org to the new
cluster running at Bytemark [2]. Many thanks to the CS Department of the
University of Helsinki for running piatti.debian.org since at least 2006!

Today piuparts.debian.org runs as two systems: pejacevic.debian.org acts as
the piuparts-master and serves the webpages, while piu-slave-bm-a.debian.org
runs 4 slaves on its 4 cores. That VM also has 12gb of RAM so that basically
all installs happen in a ramdisk, leading to piuparts run times of
30-240 seconds. I'd say the setup is 12 times faster than the old.

New suites
----------

We are testing a few new suites too, so that now we have:

new:  experimental 6915 packages, 6052 pass, 15 fail
new:  sid2experimental
      sid 38581 packages, 36374 pass, 241 fail
new:  sid-nodoc (see below for an explanation)
      testing2sid
new:  jessie 37407 packages, 37258 pass, 41 fail
new:  wheezy2jessie
new:  wheezy2bpo2jessie
      wheezy 35982 packages, 35902 pass, 9 fail
      squeeze2wheezy
new:  squeeze2bpo2wheezy
      squeeze 28119 packages, 27819 pass, 30 fail
      lenny2squeeze

sid-nodoc [3] is a new "suite" where sid is being tested with no files in
/usr/share/doc - this is allowed by policy but we expect some maintainer
scripts to fail under this condition. Other candidates for such special
"suites" are described in #354842, #403648, #56144, #561445. Please comment
on which test cases you find most useful.

The webpages served by http://piuparts.debian.org are updated twice a day now.

adequate
--------
sid-nodoc will also be the first suite to be completly tested with
adequate [4] which from piuparts 0.52 will be automatically run if it's
installed. http://piuparts.debian.org/sid/inadequate_issue.html shows
some example reports.

The first million
-----------------
piuparts.debian.org now keeps just over a million logfiles: 275211 current
logfiles and 729433 archived ones, which resulted in 1777 bugs [5] being filed
of which 281 are still open.

Help wanted
-----------
piuparts is developed by three persons currently and it's fun! Please join the
piuparts-devel at lists.alioth.debian.org mailinglist and start providing patches
for any of the more than 50 open bugs against piuparts. Check out
the "develop" branch from git [6] to get the latest development version.

We absolutly appreciate patches from one time contributors! Keep them coming!

Thanks
------
Our thanks go to the University of Helsinki and Bytemark for providing the
hardware to run piuparts.debian.org, to the Debian System Administration team
for keeping the systems up and running smoothly and to you, for reading so
long, using piuparts and maintaining free software properly! :-)


cheers,
	Holger

[1] http://piuparts.debian.org/doc/README.html
[2] http://bits.debian.org/2013/04/bytemark-donation.html
[3] http://piuparts.debian.org/sid-nodoc/
[4] http://packages.qa.debian.org/a/adequate.html
[5] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?tag=piuparts;users=debian-qa@lists.debian.org&archive=both
[6] http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=piuparts/piuparts.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/develop
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