Martin Pitt

addicted to Ubuntu development

Artikel getaggt mit testing

Precise’s QA improvements for Alpha-1

Dez 1

Gepostet von pitti in ubuntu | 5 Kommentare

I’m the release engineer in charge for Precise Alpha 1 which is currently being prepared. I must say, this has been a real joy! The fruits of the new QA paradigm and strategy and the new Stable+1 maintenance team have already achieved remarkable results:

  • The archive consistency reports like component-mismatches, uninstallability, etc. now appear about 20 minutes earlier than in oneiric.
  • CD image builds can now happen 30 minutes earlier after the publisher start, and are much quicker now due to moving to newer machines. We can now build an i386 or amd64 CD image in 8 minutes! Currently they still need to wait for the slow powerpc buildd, but moving to a faster machine there is in progress. These improvements lead to much faster image rebuild turnarounds.
  • Candidate CDs now get automatically posted to the new ISO tracker as soon as they appear.
  • Whenever a new Ubuntu image is built (daily or candidate), they automatically get smoke-tested, so we know that the installer works under some standard scenarios and produces an install which actually boots.
  • Due to the new discipline and the stable+1 team, we had working daily ISOs pretty much every day. In previous Alphas, the release engineer(s) pretty much had to work fulltime for a day or two to fix the worst uninstallability etc., all of this now went away.

All this meant that as a release engineer almost all of the hectic and rather dull work like watching for finished ISO builds and posting them or getting the archive into a releasable state completely went away. We only had to decide when it was a good time for building a set of candidate images, and trigger them, which is just copy&pasting some standard commands.

So I could fully concentrate on the interesting bits like actually investigating and debugging bug reports and regressions. As the Law of Conservation of Breakage dictates, taking away work from the button pushing side just caused the actual bugs to be much harder and earned us e. g. this little gem which took Jean-Baptiste, Andy, and me days to even reproduce properly, and will take much more to debug and fix.

In summary, I want to say a huge “Thank you!” to the Canonical QA team, in particular Jean-Baptiste Lallement for setting up the auto-testing and Jenkins integration, and the stable+1 team (Colin Watson, Mike Terry, and Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre in November) for keeping the archive in such excellent shape and improving our tools!

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12.04: Testing FTW

Nov 7

Gepostet von pitti in ubuntu | 11 Kommentare

I arrived back home in Augsburg, from last week’s Ubuntu Developer Summit in Orlando, FL. As this is a quality/LTS cycle, we pretty much already knew in advance what to do (bug fixing, bug fixing, some boot speed, and did I mention bug fixing?), but still we had many highly interesting and exciting sessions this time, not so much about what we are going to do, but how we are going to build 12.04.

So far our common practice has been to toss everything new into the development release until Feature Freeze and then try and clean up most of the fallout. Me and many other developers have always cried for having more time for fixing long-standing bugs and not introducing breakage in the first place. It seems that now with 12.04, Ubuntu/Canonical are actually getting serious about it.

(Any resemblance to that postcard from the Kennedy Space Center which I went to last Sunday is of course absolutely unintended and purely coincidental :-) ).

The mission statement is now to have working ISOs, stable → development, and daily intra-development upgrades every day, quick and regular cleanup of uninstallable packages, component-mismatches, NBS etc., backed by a new “stable +1″ team backed by three people on a rotational shift.

QA team is now setting up daily automatic smoketesting of the installer and other packages which have tests. For the latter we’ll convert some packages to the DEP-8, the proposed format for running autopkgtest on (I’ll do udisks, postgresql-common, pygobject, apport, and jockey soon).

We’ll try do put uploads which might break something (like new libraries) to a staging area first, against which we can run test suites of reverse dependencies before it lands in the new release. As doing this on a large scale still requires infrastructure to be created, we’ll only exercise it for a few packages by uploading to precise-proposed first, but this has a high potential for extension.

We want to commit to fixing major breakage within 3 hours of development time, or otherwise revert the faulty package to the previous version (unless that aggravates problems, such as file conflicts).

Finally, for Canonical upstreams we are introducing “acceptance criteria”, which will hopefully significantly raise the quality and lower the regressions of each Unity etc. release.

So, the mission is clear. In practice we’ll probably have to make some real-life concessions, and Murphy’s law dictates that there still will be some breakage, but we can learn from that as we go.

Let’s build 12.04 LTS!

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Riding the Pangolin

Nov 4

Gepostet von pitti in ubuntu | 1 Kommentar

Just took the plunge, using the excellent bandwidth and local mirror at UDS:

$ lsb_release -irc
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Release: 12.04
Codename: precise

Nothing blew up in my face, so it seems today is a good day to die^Wupgrade.

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Debian/Ubuntu packages for PostgreSQL 9.1 Beta 2

Jun 14

Gepostet von pitti in debian, ubuntu | 8 Kommentare

Hot on the heels of the Announcement of the second 9.1 Beta release there are now packages for it in Debian experimental and backports for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, 10.10. and 11.04 in my PostgreSQL backports for stable Ubuntu releases PPA.

Warning for upgrades from Beta 1: The on-disk database format changed since Beta-1. So if you already have the beta-1 packages installed, you need to pg_dumpall your 9.1 clusters (if you still need them), and pg_dropcluster all 9.1 clusters before the upgrade. I added a check to the pre-install script to make the postgresql-9.1 package fail early to upgrade if you still have existing 9.1 clusters to avoid data loss.

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Packages for PostgreSQL 9.1 Beta 1 now available

Mai 11

Gepostet von pitti in debian, ubuntu | 13 Kommentare

Two weeks ago, PostgreSQL announced the first beta version of the new major 9.1 version, with a lot of anticipated new features like synchronous replication or better support for multilingual databases. Please see the release announcement for details.

Due to my recent moving and the Ubuntu Developer Summit it took me a bit to package them for Debian and Ubuntu, but here they are at last. I uploaded postgresql-9.1 to Debian experimental; currently they are sitting in the NEW queue, but I’m sure our restless Debian archive admins will get to it in a few days. I also provided builds for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, 10.10. and 11.04 in my PostgreSQL backports for stable Ubuntu releases PPA.

I provided full postgresql-common integration, i. e. you can use all the usual tools like pg_createcluster, pg_upgradecluster etc. to install 9.1 side by side with your 8.4/9.0 instances, attempt an upgrade of your existing instances to 9.1 without endangering the running clusters, etc. Fortunately this time there were no deprecated configuration options, so pg_upgradecluster does not actually have to touch your postgresql.conf for the 9.0 →9.1 upgrade.

They pass upstream’s and postgresql-common’s integration test suite, so should be reasonably working. But please let me know about everything that doesn’t, so that we can get them in perfect shape in time for the final release.

I anticipate that 9.1 will be the default (and only supported) version in the next Debian release (wheezy), and will most likely be the one shipped in the next Ubuntu LTS (in 12.04). It might be that the next Ubuntu release 11.10 will still ship with 9.0, but that pretty much depends on how many extensions get ported to 9.1 by feature freeze.

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Creating an HTTPS server in Python

Jan 4

Gepostet von pitti in ubuntu | 1 Kommentar

For a test suite I need to create a local SSL-enabled HTTPS server in my Python project. I googled around and found various recipes using pyOpenSSL, but all of those are quite complicated, and I didn’t even get the referenced one to work.

Also, Python has shipped its own built-in SSL module for quite a while. After reading some docs and playing around, I eventually got it to work with a remarkably simple piece of code using the builtin ssl module:

import BaseHTTPServer, SimpleHTTPServer
import ssl

httpd = BaseHTTPServer.HTTPServer(('localhost', 4443), SimpleHTTPServer.SimpleHTTPRequestHandler)
httpd.socket = ssl.wrap_socket (httpd.socket, certfile='path/to/localhost.pem', server_side=True)
httpd.serve_forever()

(I use port 4443 so that I can run the tests as normal user; the usual port 443 requires root privileges).

Way to go, Python!

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PostgreSQL 9.0 RC1 available for testing

Sep 1

Gepostet von pitti in debian, ubuntu | 5 Kommentare

PostgreSQL 9.0 with a whole lot of new features and improvements is nearing completion. The first release candidate was just announced.

As with the beta versions, I uploaded RC1 to Debian experimental again. If you want to test/use them on Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx), you can get packages from my “PostgreSQL backports for stable Ubuntu releases” PPA. Please let me know if you need them for other releases.

Just for the records, both Debian 6.0 “Squeeze” and Ubuntu 10.10 “Maverick Meerkat” will release and officially support 8.4 only, as 9.0 is too late for the feature freezes of both. Also, it will take quite some time to update all the packaged extensions to 9.0. As usual, 9.0 will be provided as official backports for both Debian and Ubuntu.

Happy testing!

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Apport crash processing now enabled for Maverick

Jul 5

Gepostet von pitti in ubuntu | 2 Kommentare

The Debian import freeze is settled, the first rush of major changes went into Maverick, and the dust now has settled a bit. Thus it’s time to turn back some attention to crashes and quality in general.

This morning I created maverick chroots for the Apport retracers, and they are currently processing the backlog. I also uploaded a new Apport package which now enables crash reporting by default again.

Happy segfaulting!

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Celebrating the 1000th postgresql-common commit

Mai 3

Gepostet von pitti in debian, ubuntu | 6 Kommentare

I just did the 1000th commit of postgresql-common, the Debian/Ubuntu PostgreSQL management utilities. Wow, what started as a small hack in December 2004 to be able to install several major PostgreSQL versions in parallel has turned out to be a > 600 kB project providing a comprehensive tool set for uniformly setting up, upgrading, and maintaining PostgreSQL database instances from version 7.4 up to the just announced 9.0 beta-1, with a comprehensive test suite that I’m really proud of (it tests just about every aspect, option, and corner case of the installation, integration, upgrade, locale support, and error handling, and takes about half an hour on my system).

The actual commit is rather dull though, it’s just the release/upload tag for version 107 which I just uploaded to Debian unstable (it will hit Ubuntu maverick and backports soon). 107 introduces support for PostgreSQL 9.0, and I fixed up the scripts and tests enough so that all the tests pass now, and thus it’s good for public release.

I also uploaded the 9.0 beta 1 server itself now. It’ll be in Debian’s NEW queue for a bit, and hit experimental in a few days (or hours; recently the ftpmasters have been awesome!) It has a few cool new features (see the announcement), and upstream really appreciates testing and feedback. So, bug reports appreciated!

In particular, if you have existing 8.4 clusters you can just try to pg_upgradecluster them to 9.0 beta 1. Remember, if anything goes wrong, the cluster of the previous version is still intact and untouched, so you can run upgrades as many times as you like and only pg_dropcluster the old one when you’re completely satisfied with the upgrade.

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PostgreSQL bug fix releases up for testing in Ubuntu

Apr 9

Gepostet von pitti in debian, ubuntu | Keine Kommentare

PostgreSQL did microrelease updates three weeks ago: 8.4.3, 8.3.10, and 8.1.20 are the ones relevant for Debian/Ubuntu. There haven’t been reports about regressions in Debian or the upstream lists so far, so it’s time to push these into stable releases.

The new releases are in Lucid Beta-2, and hardy/jaunty/karmic-proposed. If you are running PostgreSQL, please upgrade to the proposed versions and give feedback to LP #557408.

Updates for Debian Lenny are prepared as well, and await release team ack.

On a related note, I recently fixed quite a major problem in pg_upgradecluster in postgresql-common 106: It did not copy database-level ACLs and configuration settings (Debian #543506). Fixing this required some reenginering of the upgrade process. It’s all thoroughly test case’d, but practical feedback would be very welcome! Remember, if anything goes wrong, the cluster of the previous version is still intact and untouched, so you can run upgrades as many times as you like and only pg_dropcluster the old one when you’re completely satisfied with the upgrade.

Thanks,

Martin

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