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/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
