• Misc Developer News (#49)

    From Paul Wise@21:1/5 to All on Wed Aug 21 12:00:01 2019
    The news are collected on https://wiki.debian.org/DeveloperNews
    Please contribute short news about your work/plans/subproject.

    In this issue:
    + Self-service buildd givebacks
    + Removal of the mips architecture
    + Superficial package testing
    + Debian Developers Reference now maintained as ReStructuredText
    + Scope of debian-mentors broadened to help with infrastructure questions
    + Hiding package tracker action items

    Self-service buildd givebacks
    -----------------------------

    Philipp Kern has created[1] an *experimental* service that allows Debian
    members to perform self-service retries of failed package builds (aka
    give-backs). This service aims to reduce the time it takes for give-back
    requests to be processed, which was done manually by the wanna-build
    admins until now. The service is authenticated using the Debian Single
    Signon[2] service. Debian members are still expected to act responsibly
    when looking at build failures; do your due diligence and try reproducing
    the issue on a porterbox first. Access to this service is logged and logs
    will be audited by the admins.

    -- Paul Wise

    [1] https://debblog.philkern.de/2019/08/alpha-self-service-buildd-givebacks.html
    [2] https://sso.debian.org/

    Removal of the mips architecture
    --------------------------------

    Aurelien Jarno recently proposed[3] the mips architecture (supporting
    32-bit big-endian MIPS CPUs) for removal and then got it removed[4]. This
    removal affects bullseye and sid but not buster or stretch. Please
    prepare to migrate your MIPS hardware to mipsel or mips64el, much recent
    MIPS hardware (such as Octeon CPUs) supports endian switching at runtime
    and can therefore be supported by the other MIPS ports.

    The removal was due to the limited 2GB virtual address space and because
    the architecture is one of the last big-endian architecture Debian
    supports, the porting effort became increasingly difficult. On the other
    hand the level of interest for this architecture is going down, and with
    it the human resources available for porting is going down.

    -- Paul Wise

    [3] https://lists.debian.org/msgid-search/20190720104654.GA25138@aurel32.net
    [4] https://lists.debian.org/msgid-search/20190820131758.GB23914@aurel32.net

    Superficial package testing
    ---------------------------

    A number of Debian packages use `cmd --version` or `cmd --help` as an
    autopkgtest. This solely tests the command-line and options parsing of
    the command but does not test any significant functionality of the
    command. Such tests do not provide significant test coverage, so if they
    pass, that does not necessarily mean that the package under test is
    actually functional in any useful way. autopkgtest supports marking such
    tests with the superficial tag[5] for the Restrictions field. Please
    check your package tests and make sure they are using Restrictions:
    superficial where appropriate. A request for a lintian complaint for
    common cases of this issue has been filed[6] but many of the superficial
    tests in Debian will not be detectable by lintian because doing so would
    require parsing shell and deciding what it tests and if that is
    superficial or not.

    Superficial tests are useful to detect severe breakage but please also
    ensure that your package has some non-superficial tests that actually
    test significant functionality of your package.

    -- Paul Wise

    [5] https://salsa.debian.org/ci-team/autopkgtest/blob/master/doc/README.package-tests.rst#L302
    [6] https://bugs.debian.org/932862

    Debian Developers Reference now maintained as ReStructuredText --------------------------------------------------------------

    After 22 years of the Debian Developers Reference being maintained as an
    SGML document, the sources are now maintained as ReStructuredText, while
    the translations remain .po files.

    Please note that this is work in progress and that there will be bugs.
    Please do file them, with or without patches.

    Big kudos and many thanks to Osamu Aoki for doing most of the work on
    this. Obviously also many thanks to everyone else involved, both upstream
    and in Debian!

    -- Holger Levsen

    Scope of debian-mentors broadened to help with infrastructure questions -----------------------------------------------------------------------

    Debian-mentors explicitly endorses questions about Debian infrastructure
    projects on the mailinglist[7] and IRC channel[8]. This is the result of
    a discussion[9] on debian-project and debian-mentors. There seems to be
    some consensus that such infrastructure projects are the ones in Debian
    that most badly need more contributors. At the same time, our
    infrastructure projects/teams have a rather high entry barrier.
    Apparently, one reason is that understaffed teams with high workload
    usually lack the time and resources to mentor new contributors. This
    basically means that new contributors can send their questions regarding
    Debian infrastructure projects to debian-mentors, *and* infrastructure
    groups that lack the time to reply to newbie questions are invited to
    redirect those questions there.

    The debian-mentors FAQ[10] has been updated accordingly.

    -- Jonas Meurer

    [7] https://lists.debian.org/debian-mentors/
    [8] irc://irc.debian.org/debian-mentors
    [9] https://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2019/06/msg00040.html
    [10] https://wiki.debian.org/DebianMentorsFaq#Infrastructure_Projects

    Hiding package tracker action items
    -----------------------------------

    The Debian package tracker lists action items for each package. Some of
    these may not apply to individual visitors to the package tracker. For
    example, people who have enough packages to maintain already probably
    don't want to see suggestions to adopt orphaned dependencies of packages.
    The Debian package tracker now[11] applies an action-item-* CSS class to
    each action item representing the type of the action item. You can use
    this via the Stylus WebExtension[12] (not yet[13] in Debian) or Firefox's
    userContent.css[14]. For example, this CSS will hide items suggesting
    adoption of orphaned dependencies:

    .action-item-debian-depneedsmaint { display: none; }

    -- Paul Wise

    [11] https://salsa.debian.org/qa/distro-tracker/commit/332a4cdb7c020d504cbb576d4b45f4113b656a1c
    [12] https://add0n.com/stylus.html
    [13] https://bugs.debian.org/904577
    [14] http://kb.mozillazine.org/index.php?title=UserContent.css

    --
    bye,
    pabs

    https://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise

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