Debian Perl Group Rolling Sprint at DebCamp 2015
Introduction
The Debian Perl Group conducted a "Rolling Sprint" during DebCamp 2015 in Heidelberg from 2015-08-10 - 2015-08-14.
The term "Rolling Sprint" describes an event that extended over the whole DebCamp week with the opportunity for people to "hop on" and "hop off" for one or more days. This made it possible for persons who had more plans for DebCamp than one single area of work to participate according to their availability.
The structure of the "Rolling Sprint" was:
- A daily meeting after breakfast, where people coordinate the work for this day;
- people working on their selected tasks over the day, alone, in pairs, in groups;
- short reports about the achieved work in the next morning meeting.
Altogether 8 people took part in one or more of the coordination meetings and/or work sessions: XTaran, ansgar, bremner, carnil, fsfs, gregoa, intrigeri, kanashiro.
The participants would like to thank the sponsors of DebConf15 and the DebConf Team for making this sprint possible.
git and patches - git-debcherry
Following up in the discussions and work done at the pkg-perl BoF at DebConf14 and the Debian Perl Sprint in May 2015, more work was done on experimenting with our workflow regarding patches in git, especially around git-debcherry.
On Tuesday afternoon, bremner gave a demo of git-debcherry in combination with ntyni's tools.
A newer git-debcherry with improvements (especially around git-notes) was uploaded during DebCamp, fixing two bugs:
- #784130: ping maintainer, patch seems ready.
- #784159: style updates to patch, sign-off on new feature.
In the following discussion, several issues and questions were raised:
- Minor glitches in the scripts, which were fixed later in the week by fsfs.
- The main question is still: How to work on a git-debcherried package without buying into git-debcherry?
- Brainstorming: commit patches on a specific branch (or on master), allow people to work there, create tooling to import changes / new patches from this branch back into master (at
dpt checkout time?). Maybe with a special header "X-Generated-By: git-debcherry" to filter?
- If we had a patch branch:
- when/how to write to this branch? when: commit at sign/tag/upload time
- when/how to re-import into master manually created patches?
- gbp doesn't fetch notes yet (bug report by XTaran, bremner will write a patch): #786607
- in the meantime,
dpt-checkout and our .mrconfig fetch the notes refs
In the following days fsfs converted two packages to use git-debcherry and on the way improved the tools. The exported quilt patches are committed on master in debian/patches, so the git checkout is identical to the source package with no magic going on at build time. Working on one of those packages with quilt while ignoring git-debcherry requires an extra step to make the already-applied patches known to quilt, and may in turn force the next developer to take additional measures to reintegrate that work with git-debcherry. The need for both is readily apparent, however, and no work is lost permanently, so this looks like a promising way to a new, git-centric workflow.
Work on individual packages
- #732725 (libogre-perl FTBFS) → #795067 (RM; RoM) [abe]
- #794963 (Net::XMPP warnings under setuid/root): Tried to reproduce [abe]
- libdatetime-timezone-perl: update to Olson db 2015f in sid, jessie, wheezy
- #791507: new upstream version [bremner], uploaded to Debian [carnil]
- Update liburi-perl and libcatalyst-perl (fixes an RC bug).
- libglib-perl: cleaned up patches, split some, and forwarded them all upstream.
- dh-dist-zilla, libdist-zilla-perl, etc.
QA work across packages
- Update many packages to new upstream versions. [kanashiro]
- Run DUCK over all packages.
Bug triaging
- Forward bugs reports upstream.
- Ping upstream bug reports for RC bugs / Perl 5.22 transition problems.
- Report new bugs from going through the reproducible build logs.
- Go through ci.debian.net failures, fix packages, file bugs.
PET/repository maintenance
- missing tags: ping maintainers to push missing tags/branches to git.deban.org
- repository cleanup: ping maintainers about packages which are in git but never uploaded
Unification across packages
- unify paths in lintian overrides for multi-arch paths in hardening-no-fortify-functions tag
- attempt to unify uversionmangle in d/watch: cancelled, too much variance, no clear "best" option, too little gain
- attempt to switch from repacking framework to Files-Excluded: cancelled, mk-origtargz errors out too often
- unify environment variables for disabling network tests (debian/rules and debian/patches)
- unify TEST_FILES filtering in debian/rules
- update examples/check-build: run adt-run; manipulate .changes with mergechanges; add support for adt-qemu
- patchedit: support $EDITOR containing options or parameters [abe/carnil]
- dpt-import-orig: check also for upstream tags with padding zeros removed
lintian
Since 2013, we have a team-specific lintian profile. During the sprint, XTaran moved some of the checks, which are relevant for others as well, to lintian proper.
Statistics
- Andreas Tille pointed out (both in private and in one of his talks) that pkg-perl is exceptional in its distribution of number of maintainers per package.
- During DebCamp and DebConf (IRC log from 2015-08-10T00:00+02:00 - 2015-08-23T23:59:59+02:00) 189 packages were uploaded, closing 19 bugs.
Resources
