How help in arch testing work
 

This mail is come from my long time experience about testing.

So, everytime, I must suggest the same things and I can say that at some point
it gets boring.

I appreciate the work of all, but I must say that some people pay little
attention to stablereq bugs, so this mail wants to be a short reminder of what
could decrease our work.

1) There is a discussion[1] about it, but for the moment, a stablereq should
be "keywording and stabilization" and enhancement importance.
If you need to accelerate the stabilization please set high and not from
enhancement to critical and so on.
Don't forget STABLEREQ keyword or the bug will not appears in our list.

2) _Before_ filing a request, please run repoman full, to be sure that there
is nothing to fix, then take a look at the ebuild and make sure your ebuild
have a minimum of QA; all external binary called in the ebuild(sed, mv, cp,
ln, rm, and so on) should have 'die'; if you don't use EAPI4, make sure that
all portage helper[2] have also '|| die'.

3) Check your rdepend, where is possible with scanelf[3] and if you declare
it, please, as you said, exclude gcc/glibc and all package from @system

4) Nobody knows how work all packages in tree, so there are obvious packages
like a browsers, IM, audio player,that is easy decide if is ok or not, but
there are also packages that an Arch tester has never seen, so is a lack of
time everytime google about it or ask to maintainer, so, please specify what
test you want for this package; e.g.
-only compile test
-compile test and make sure src_test goes well
-make sure /usr/bin/${foo} works properly in ${that} manner
-see 5) about library

So, you can write one time 'how to' and copy/paste for the future stablereq; I
guess I'm not asking a long and difficult task.

5) If is a library, obviously, we can try to rebuild stable RDEPENDS in tree
and an easy way to check the list of rdepend is asking our bot:
!rdep ${package}
Unfortunately it prints a complete list of RDEPEND(stable+testing), and is a
lack of time checking manually what is the list of stable packages.
So you can lighten our work in 2 ways:
a) Please rebuild the following list of rdepends.( if no need to rebuild all
because maintainer already do it)
b) Please rebuild all rdepends.
So, unfortunately, I don't know a rapid way to have only a stable list of
packages, so if really there isn't it, is very very appreciated print the list
of packages that needs rebuild
Sorry in advance if there is and I'm ignoring it, please tell me.



I want to point out that this is not a polemic, but is a way to suggest what
you can do for arch teams to increase the quality of teamwork and do not waste
precious time.


[1]: https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=381627
[2]: qlist -e portage | grep ebuild-helpers
[3]: amd64box ~ # cat /usr/local/bin/scan
#!/bin/bash
qlist -e "$@" | xargs scanelf -L -n -q -F '%n #F' | tr , ' ' | xargs qfile -Cv
| sort -u | awk '{print $1}' | uniq

--
Agostino Sarubbo ago -at- gentoo.org
Gentoo/AMD64 Arch Security Liaison
GPG: 0x7CD2DC5D