[csw-maintainers] automated catalog promotion for packages

[Ben Walton]

Excerpts from Dagobert Michelsen's message of Fri Nov 18 03:59:57 -0500 2011:

> - It is really slow as it involves testing the catalog as a whole.
>   This may be simplified to only look for new packages and all of
>   their dependencies. The initial discussion was about testing this
>   on every push to unstable which probably really is too much, but I
>   guess it may be ok for a daily propagation.

Yes, it would be heavy, but it's really the only way to validate the
binary interfaces.  We'd need to ensure that the set going into the
testing catalog passed a set of checks like when we use
csw-upload-pkg.  That's pretty straight forward.

We then need to verify that anything depending on the new packages (if
we're talking update) still passes checkpkg.  This is where things
start to get tricky.  As you say, old errors are bound to be there and
those shouldn't block anything.  

> - There are always lots of old errors from other packages disturbing
>   the measurement.  Last thing I remember was an idea to see if the
>   number of reported errors lessened in total and that there were no
>   new errors. That means errors(new catalog) subset of errors(old
>   catalog)

I'm not sure we should test the whole catalog.  Rather, I'd narrow it
to the affected packages.  We can use a similar heuristic, but with
fewer packages involved.

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