[yocto-ab] Project Status

[Philip Balister]

Regrading patchwork, do you have an estimate of manpower needs to cover
patchwork?

Philip

On 05/13/2019 03:14 AM, Richard Purdie wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> I wanted to give everyone an update of where the project is at.
> 
> Current Status
> ==============
> 
> 2.7 was released on schedule and on the most part with the features as
> planned. In particular I want to highlight the improvements in the
> automated QA situation. We've removed dependencies on legacy tools like
> testopia and now have a bare bones resulttool which gives us customised
> results handling. This is very simple code but extremely powerful to
> let the project do exactly what we need. An example of what this gives
> us is this automated report:
> 
> https://autobuilder.yocto.io/pub/non-release/20190512-10/testresults/testresult-report.txt
> 
> The top chart gives an index summary of all the tests that are run be
> them selftest, runtime, sdk or esdk. This allows easy comparison with
> previous builds. During 2.7 we significantly increased the number of
> tests which were automated and have started working through automation
> of more of the manual tests.
> 
> The next section is ptest which gives pass/fail/skip and timing counts
> for each recipe. There has been a huge amount of work in having stable
> numbers here but I believe we now have consistent results and can work
> on reducing the fail counts. These ptests have already caught a kernel
> bug which was reported upstream and fixed in the 5.0 stable series.
> 
> Post 2.7 we have developments in master where Armin added ltp support
> and this report includes those after ptest results. Again, this gives
> us a baseline which we can investigate and improve upon.
> 
> Challenges
> ==========
> 
> As many know, Stephen who was acting as our program manager in his own
> time was injured in an accident and we're having to manage without him.
> Several people have been helping out with different meetings but it has
> had an impact on 2.8 planning which I'm driving in his absence.
> 
> Its become apparent we have some resource gaps in some key areas of the
> project for 2.8:
> 
> * Patchtest/patchwork offline and no maintainer (bug 13284)
> * Reproducible builds automated testing (bug 13323)
> * Build artefact reuse (bug 10682)
> * License infrastructure improvements (bug 13321, 13322)
> * Autobuilder code bugs (bug 13332, 13329)
> 
> To give a bit more information on these:
> 
> We have no active maintainers for some key pieces of infrastructure.
> I'm personally covering the autobuilder, patchwork/patchtest have no
> active coverage.
> 
> Two key focus areas of the project should be reproducibility and
> license handling but we have nobody working on these either.
> 
> Finally, the build artefact reuse would be a *huge* feature win for the
> project with significant day to day improvement for most users. The
> base work on the sstate equivalence server has been done, the remaining
> piece is to rewrite runqueue so that it can take advantage of artefact
> equivalence mapping. This would benefit sstate cache reuse and improve
> multiconfig builds. This one is tricky in that it its highly involved
> changes at the core of bitbake and there are only a limited number of
> people with the skills. I would love to do it but I can't if I'm
> covering everything else that I'm doing.
> 
> I've also not mentioned layer setup here as that is another problem
> which needs experience to work on it and nobody with the skills has the
> bandwidth. I believe the artefact reuse would be the bigger win for the
> project. I've also not going into the hundreds of smaller day to day
> things we're doing, just the big potential gaps.
> 
> The team also decided to try and create a new class of "newcomer" bugs
> which would be straight forward enough that someone new to the project
> could work on. These can be seen here:
> https://wiki.yoctoproject.org/wiki/Bug_Triage#Newcomer_Bugs
> 
> We've not seen much take up on newcomer bugs yet, I'm hoping we can
> socialise these more and help bring some new people into the project.
> 
> I want to give the advisory board an indication of the potential missed
> opportunities we have and where we could use help. Regardless, I'm
> going to continue to work on things on a priority basis, we have a
> strong and stable platform for build off now which will help a lot.
> 
> I've tried to keep the email shorter than longer but am happy to
> provide more information on anything above, be it via email or
> potentially a meeting if there is interest.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Richard
>