[csw-maintainers] automated catalog promotion for packages

[Ben Walton]

Excerpts from Peter FELECAN's message of Fri Nov 11 08:25:44 -0500 2011:

> > 4. A bug against a dependency if it has a ticking promotion clock too.
> 
> I don't get that because a bug for the dependency would stop its
> clock, isn't it?

Sorry for the delay here...I've been thinking about this further and I
no longer think that bugs on dependencies is a good metric.

We should focus on bugs for anything in a bundle as previously
discussed, but dependencies are a different matter.

When it comes to dependencies, what we're concerned about is interface
stability, not functionality.  This makes the assumption that passing
the test suite indicates that even a buggy version of a package is
functional for the needs of the package under inspection.

What we want to prevent is changes in SONAME or for other public
interfaces that might break things depending on them.  For example,
the php (5.2.9) in dublin right now has breakage in the gd module as
libjpeg was updated and the SONAME changed.  If we were looking at
bugs on packages, we'd still have made the promotion of gd.

This now becomes a much larger puzzle...

We need to ensure that a package moving from unstable to testing does
not break packages already in test and we need to make sure that a
package cannot be promoted if the testing catalog does not provide the
required interfaces.

The pkgdb can help with this, but the questions we need to ask it are
more complex.  I think Maciej indicated that we could run a set of
packages that are up for promotion through checkpkg using the target
catalog.  This would be a good way to ensure that binary stuff
continues to function...it won't help with other types of interfaces,
but that's a smaller problem overall in my opinion.

Thoughts?

Thanks
-Ben
--
Ben Walton
Systems Programmer - CHASS
University of Toronto
C:416.407.5610 | W:416.978.4302