Hey, It's been a while since I sent out the last update on QA things that I've been working on, there was a small update back in May [1] and one before that in March [2].
1: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2023-05/msg00142.html 2: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2023-03/msg00222.html ## Changes since the last update The QA frontpage processing branches is now automatically handled through creating issues. This seems to be working really well, both as a process for making it clear what's going on with which branch, and also feeding in to the automation and testing. Old builds for patches and branches are now cancelled. This helps the bordeaux build farm work on the most relevant builds. Branch comparisons now are done against the merge base, rather than master, this just helps give relevant feedback. There's also a new package changes page which is linked to from the package changes table on the issue and branch pages. This starts to address the long standing issue where you can't see what the numbers in the package changes table relate to. ## Current state While the software is getting better, the service overall is struggling a bit and that looks to continue for the short term at least. The queue is very large at [3]. The branches for lots of patches could have been rebased due to the tex-team-next merge, although it's possible that the missing i686-linux and armhf-linux derivations recently are causing some patches to be repeatedly rebased. It'll take a few weeks to get back to a point where there's data on lots of patch series. 3: https://data.qa.guix.gnu.org/jobs/queue Discussions ongoing about hosting for data.qa.guix.gnu.org going forward. So far I've been organising and paying for a virtual machine to run this, but I'd like to stop by the end of the year. On the bordeaux build farm side, there's been quite a lot of work recently on growing the available storage for nars. With the recent work on branches though, I think it's easier to feel the impact of not having many available machines. While it's possible to just wait longer for builds to complete, that has it's own disadvantages. harbourfront (one of the 3 x86_64 machines is going away at the end of August) which will further reduce the already limited capacity for x86_64-linux and i686-linux builds. I'm in the progress of drafting a blog post about the qa-frontpage. ## Next steps The qa-frontpage still could do with giving clearer and more actionable feedback. The other big issue on my mind is getting the data service to process revisions in less time, as that'll help give quicker feedback and cope better when rebasing large numbers of patch branches. Apart from that, I'd like to get back to actually using qa.guix.gnu.org to review patches, that's a little difficult at the moment as data is available for very view patches. Also, as mentioned above, more work needs doing on longer term hosting for some of the services, as well as growing the bordeaux build farm so that it can keep up with the growing load. Let me know if you have any questions or comments! Thanks, Chris
