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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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