cool stuff at EDOS - collaboration ideas
Hi,
we (Enrico, Martin (tbm) and Andi (aba)) visited the EDOS workshop at the
Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre (RMLL) http://www.rmll.info/ on
Thursday and Friday. Besides giving talks about how QA and release
management work in Debian, and how easy it is to create Custom Debian
Distributions, we heard a good many talks about what has happened in the
EDOS project itself. Some funny things, some interesting and some
not-so-interesting things we were told.
One of the funny ones is the "Debian weather", which represents the
installability status of the packages in the form of the current weather
(i.e. which percentage packages are uninstallable):
http://brion.inria.fr/anla/health?bundle=U&architecture=i386
Some of the ideas we gathered about that was to combine that with RC bug
status, and/or to put it up as applet in desktop environments (or
perhaps also as something you can run at fortune time, or ...). Of
course, the current weather could also be included at the web page or
wherever. :)
Another nice thing was that they converted our normal dependencies
(which include conflicts, provides) to SAT, and put a normal SAT
resolver on it. One nice side effect of that was that one can measure
the "SAT temperature", which means: how hard is it to resolve that
formula. Most packages are pretty cool, but we have some hotspots.
Actually, it might be interesting to use the sorted list as input to
some other tasks (just one idea we had was co-installability testing on
piuparts) - but there's definitly more to come. Or perhaps also
sometimes later as hints for apt to use? It might be possible to add
value from that to the testing scripts, status checkers etc - but that's
not the first step of course.
Also, they had some engine for package comparison and search (where the
weather was one of the side spin-offs from it). This could help us to
ask more question about package aspects, and they are waiting for inputs
from us to have questions more in the way we like. The interface is at:
http://brion.inria.fr/anla/ (and there is a more detailed CLI - but that
currently generates a bit of load, and of course all of that is still
alpha state). An extended package search is on
http://ara.edos-project.org/
They also updated the debcheck package - now in the archive as
edos-debcheck. Probably we should consider to use that on the
qa.d.o-website.
The dependency check people also provided some code to check which
packages were co-installable in sarge and are no longer in etch. Please
expect some mail from me about the details soon. (Well, I'm waiting on
some mail from them, but they're apparently not in the office today. :)
Some other idea was an apt with integrated rollback functionality. Though
we were not so convinced how they did it (and, btw, they only did it for
apt-rpm), it gave us an idea to integrate apt with some VCS for etc (eg.
in order to role back configuration changes).
Another idea we made up on our own was to create a second Packages file
which could have "minor" information about packages - Bug status,
temperature, popcon data, ... Might be nice for playing around, and
we'll see how it's useful.
There was also a group presenting about distro testing stuff. We're not
as sure how far they are - but we'll try to give them some real life
task to resolve (which would be useful for the release as well :).
Ok, so much on what happened. The depedency people were very nice,
helpful and open to suggestions from us, and invited me (aba) to come to
Paris to continue discussion and integration. Perhaps someone else
should come also - we need to sort that out. They also have already
contact with Pierre (Madcoder). We definitly think there are good things
to come and help us, so we're enthusiastic about working together with
them.
We encourage you to take a look at their web site and projects, and send
useful ideas, suggestions and questions to the list. We will forward
them to the EDOS people in order to start a discussion:
weather: http://brion.inria.fr/anla/health?bundle=U&architecture=i386
package exploration: http://brion.inria.fr/anla/
package search: http://ara.edos-project.org/
distro testing: http://www.edos-project.org/qa/
main page: http://www.edos-project.org/xwiki/bin/Main/
Cheers,
Andi, Enrico, Martin
--
http://home.arcor.de/andreas-barth/
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