Running Britney more often than 2/day

[Niels Thykier <niels@thykier.net>]

Hi,

I have found myself wanting Britney run more often than 2/day.  My
primary interest is getting the excuses updated more often, so they
reflect the current status of a package (rather than being up to 12
hours out of date).
  It would hopefully also mean that we would see fewer unblock requests
for things we have already unblocked (by looking at the fixed RC bugs).

I propose two solutions:

 * Short term, do 4 runs a day (1/dinstall)

 * Long term, support "excuses-only" runs and do a run 1/hour.
   - Only 2-4 of them would actually do the migrations (among other
     because we need a dinstall to "commit" the changes anyway).

The short term solution is trivial to implement:

 * Change Britney's "start of day" from 3 pm to 7pm a la [1] (so aging
   still occurs for the 22:00 UTC run).

 * Update our cronjob to run britney 4 times

The long term solution should be doable (we got some partial patches in
the BTS for it). However, I presume we want a separate log for
"non-migrating" run (so we can still trivially find the migration
attempts).  This may require a bit of fiddling to figure out a good
solution for that, which is why I would prefer delaying this a bit.

Assuming no objections, I intend to implement the short term solution by
the end of this week and look into doing the long term solution when
time permits.

Thanks,
~Niels

[1]

diff --git a/britney2/policies/policy.py b/britney2/policies/policy.py
index 8f108e3..645a207 100644
--- a/britney2/policies/policy.py
+++ b/britney2/policies/policy.py
@@ -240,8 +240,8 @@ class AgePolicy(BasePolicy):
         if options.default_urgency not in mindays:  # pragma: no cover
             raise ValueError("Missing age-requirement for default
urgency (MINDAYS_%s)" % options.default_urgency)
         self._min_days_default = mindays[options.default_urgency]
-        # britney's "day" begins at 3pm
-        self._date_now = int(((time.time() / (60*60)) - 15) / 24)
+        # britney's "day" begins at 7pm (we want aging to occur in the
22:00Z run and we run Britney 2-4 times a day)
+        self._date_now = int(((time.time() / (60*60)) - 19) / 24)
         self._dates = {}
         self._urgencies = {}