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2008

Foresight Packages

We are getting ready to release Foresight GNOME edition in the next week, once GNOME 2.24 is out.

Foresight is a rolling release distro – our packages are almost always up to date, and we keep them up to date, unlike most distributions that have 2 big releases a year, which is when they update packages.

Being a rolling release, this means that a Foresight “release” is just a snapshot in time of what is available in the repository.

With a big release coming up, how can you help? I’m glad you asked!

We have over 100 issues in our issue tracker (JIRA), of package requests that are complete, but need testing before we send them to the stable branch of Foresight.

To do a search in JIRA:

  1. Click here to go to the Foresight issue tracker
  2. Click on Find Issues under the Foresight logo, third from the left.
  3. Under Project, select “Foresight Linux”
  4. Under Issue Type, select “Package Requests”
  5. Now scroll down, and under Issue Attributes and Status select “Needs QA”
  6. Click View, and all the package requests that have been built and need testing will appear

Then do a couple of things:

Make sure the package hasn’t been promoted to fl:2 already:

sudo conary rq packagename=@fl:2

If it hasn’t, make sure it’s not in the QA branch:

<br /> sudo conary rq packagename=@fl:2-qa

If it’s in QA, install it:

<br /> sudo conary update packagename=@fl:2-qa

And test it!

It’s possible it might have been built and needs to be promoted from fl:2-devel, and tested:

sudo conary rq packagename=@fl:2-devel

sudo conary update packagename=@fl:2-devel

In both cases, after testing, please comment on the Issue in JIRA whether the package worked or not, or any other relevant information, for example if it’s missing a .desktop file or menu entry.

That’s it! The QA team and I watch all bug reports via email or the the #foresight-qa and #foresight-alerts channels on Freenode IRC. From there we’ll make sure it gets added to the groups and promoted to the stable branch.

Happy testing, and thank you for the help! Let’s see how many packages we can test in the next few days before Foresight 2.0.5 is released.

  • in Books
  • 1 min read

Gregory Mcdonald, RIP

Gregory Mcdonald, most famous for being the author of the Fletch series, has died at age 71 from cancer.

I’m not a big mystery reader, but due to Kevin Smith‘s praise for McDonald’s dialogue in his novels, I picked up one or two of his books, and then quickly bought them all a number of years ago.

You thought the Fletch movies (well, at least the first one) were funny? Each and every one of these books will have you chuckling and laughing out loud at some point, and the mysteries weren’t half bad either.

They’re light, quick reads, and the next time you’re looking for a book to read, I highly recommend any of his books, including both the Fletch and Flynn series.

Via John Scalzi

Foresight Bug Week Wrap-Up

Foresight Bug Week wrapped up yesterday. I was pretty excited as it seemed we touched a number of issues. Upon further review, we still have a lot of work to do!

Some stats on the last 9 days of working on the issues (hope the formatting works):

9/1/2008 9/8/2008 Net Change

Total issues: 1644 1661 17

Open issues: 597 546 -51

In progress: 19 26 7

Resolved: 578 614 36

Closed: 322 372 50

Needs QA: 106 116 10

Open Issues (By Priority)

Blocker: 2 2 0

Critical 22 20 -2

Major: 66 56 -10

Normal: 505 491 -14

Minor: 57 53 -4

Trivial: 9 10 1

I’m happy to report that Package Requests, which make up about 20% of all issues in JIRA, have been assigned to the new Packagers ID, making it easy for our crack team of packaging experts to search for stuff to do. (Which I blogged about last week).

I personally spent some time porting packages from the fl:1 repo and user contributed repos to Foresight, and closed those package requests. (It’s so much easier when someone has already written the recipe for me!)

What the stats above don’t show is the number of total issues touched, which a report I ran in JIRA puts at 275 (about 30% of all issues in JIRA, both opened and closed). This includes linking duplicates, commenting on bugs if more information is needed, etc. At the end of the day, 5% of all bugs (86) were closed and / or resolved last week, which is a good start.

Next steps:

Out of the open issues, 30% (191) remain assigned to Distro – which means they need to be assigned to a developer to be addressed. Issues needing QA – which means the packages need to be tested, is 7% (116). We also have 19% (123) open package requests assigned to the Packagers ID. Poor Ken (138) and doniphon (82) have the most issues assigned to them, so give ’em a hand and help them out! Test some packages that need QA, and comment on the issue, or if you have time, package some applications that our users have requested.

This is just the beginning of a more regular QA / Bug Triaging process. It was a good first step, and thank you to everyone who lent a hand last week to help out, and I look forward to more help in the future.

Ouch

I was traveling in Los Angeles when Kelly got a bit of a scare last week.

Jack was running around upstairs, ran into the bathroom, and he slid on the linoleum right into the shower door.

With a cut on his head bleeding profusely, I think Zoe was more scared than Jack was. (Zoe seems to have rolled a high D20 for empathy when she was born).

Kelly rushed them to the emergency room, where they numbed Jack and gave him 6 stitches. The ER nurses were amazed that after 12 years with 3 children, this was our first visit to the ER.

Jack’s doing well – since he can’t see the cut, it doesn’t bother him at all. Surprisingly, the nurses thought it won’t scar, and if it does, it will be very small and almost unnoticeable. He’ll get the stitches out later this week.

I miss all the fun when I’m off traveling for work.

IMG_2659

  • in General
  • 1 min read

Things I dislike about traveling

In no particular order:

  • Airports & airport security. Food courts and choices at airports, especially as I think they over charge. (Is their rent that expensive?)
  • Airplanes. Being crammed into a small seat with no legroom for ~4 hours, I always seem to hurt my shoulder somehow twisting around.
  • Being out of the loop on the outside world. I find when I travel, and work across the country, between being busy in the office, and then dinners with co-workers, I miss the news on TV and the internet.
  • Hotels. I never sleep well anymore. I did when I was younger.
  • Hotel showers. I hate their shower heads.
  • My feedreader explodes. I don’t have time to browse the internet, and my feedreader has hundreds of items to catch up.
  • Red-eye flights. Enough said.
  • Getting home, tired, and not having the proper energy to spend with the kids and / or wife. Lots of guilt over this one.
  • Catching up on my DVR. See feedreader above.

Foresight Bug Week

Foresight Bug Week kicked off Sunday, and we’re off to a good start.

As I mentioned in my last bug week post, Foresight has just under 600 issues open in some status or another. (Issues can be improvements, tasks, bugs or package requests).

In the first two days:

  • 15% of all open issues have been touched (about 90)
  • 34, or just over 33% of those touched, were marked as resolved or fixed
  • 56 were triaged and assigned

Out of the 56 that were triaged, the majority of them were package requests that moved from fl:2-devel to fl:2-qa for testing. This means after some testing, these can be promoted to Foresight 2 and closed as well! You can easily search for issues assigned to Foresight QA Team to see which packages need testing.

The other major change to Foresight’s issue tracker, JIRA, was that I created a new generic user, Packagers. Foresight’s JIRA has two generic users – Distro (jira-distro), which all issues are assigned to by default (which makes it easy to triage), and now Packagers (jira-packagers). This way, Foresight contributors who want to help out and create packages, can easily search by this user to see what package requests are outstanding. Most package requests still need to be triaged and assigned to Packagers.

In creating the Packagers user, I realized this weekend that we both of those users use a private mailing list we created. A number of core developers are subscribed to this list, and all issues created in JIRA are automatically emailed to this list. The same is true for the Packagers list, though it only emails those issues assigned to the Packagers user. If you would like to be added to either the JIRA mailing list (high volume) or Packagers mailing list, please drop me an email at pcutler at foresightlinux dot org and I will add you. This makes it easy to keep up in real time on JIRA activity if you so choose.

How you can help during Foresight Bug Week:

  • Join the Foresight QA team! Add your name to the list on the QA space in the wiki, and read through the QA documentation.
  • Triage, triage, triage! Are issues assigned to the right developer? Including package requests to Packagers. For a list of what developers should be assigned certain issues, take a look at the Foresight QA triaging wiki page. Is the issue assigned to the right person, is the component correct (for example I just fixed an issue that was assigned to the PackageKit component, but it was a Package request), is the serverity correct?
  • Test packages! Once a package request has been made, a few different things can happen. The packager might have built it and committed it to their personal repo, as they may not have access yet to Foresight’s repo. Install it and test it! Maybe the packager only could build it for x86, and not x86_64. Check out the recipe, and build it against both arches. (Give the original packager credit in the recipe file and bug report). Commit it to Foresight’s 2-devel repo or your personal repo and update the issue accordingly. When it’s ready to be tested, make sure it’s assigned to the Foresight QA team. Once it’s tested, it’s assigned to Ken to promote to fl:2.
  • Confirm bugs. Can you reproduce it? Comment on the issue with your findings. Check upstream – almost all packages will have their own issue tracker, and search to see if it’s been reported. If so, link to it in the Foresight issue tracker. Good story – Banshee has a bug that the first time you run it, it won’t run from the menu, only the terminal. I searched for about 15-20 minutes in Banshee’s bugzilla, but couldn’t find it, so created a bug in Banshee’s bugzilla and linked to Foresight’s issue and forums, as well as an Ubuntu forum post confirming the bug. Sure enough, it was closed almost right away in Banshee’s bugzilla as a duplicate, I just hadn’t searched hard enough. I linked to it, and within hours Ken applied the patch in Banshee’s bugzilla, and Foresight’s Banshee is now fixed. And the issue is closed!
  • Can you write code? We have lots of improvements filed, from Extlinux boot themes (FL-1532) to adding Encryption / LUKS support (FL-313) to PackageKit improvements. While Ken and doniphon may do the majority of Foresight development, it doesn’t have to be this way, and I know for a fact they would love more volunteers.
  • Need help or have a question? Ask! Join the QA team in #foresight-qa on Freenode IRC. We won’t bite, I promise.

As we continue to improve Foresight’s JIRA, my goal in the future is to publish bug stats bi-weekly. From there, I can better use JIRA’s features and build a roadmap to document how we will continue to improve Foresight.

I’d like to thank everyone who has helped out so far this week in lending a hand. A special shout out to pscott, zodman and jayson_r. Pscott for the cool IRC bot that is talking to JIRA, zodman for a number of recipes I was able to cook in x86_64 and get in to Foresight, and Jayson has dived right in and helped triage. I will be traveling the next two days, but will be back Thursday to help with more issues!