motivation
As an openQA contributor I could learn from openSUSE release managers how the overall process can be improved.
goals
- G1: One week of "openSUSE release management internship" with experiences recorded
execution
Ask openSUSE RMs how to contribute, remind myself with the process, help with SR and test review, provide issue investigation.
current status and findings
Day 1
- Had a nice introduction from DimStar into the "day of a Tumbleweed release manager" ;)
- Setup a dedicated OBS account "okurz-factory" for better priviledge separation (DimStar should give me permissions on that account)
- Looked into existing staging projects and current state of SRs, e.g. which ones are failing, linked to build failures, test failures, etc.
- Had a chat with lkocman at the Hackweek coffee&cake come together in SUSE Nbg office
- Reviewed openQA test results, fixed some openQA test failures myself, reported tickets for others
- Continued with other, related tasks, e.g. re-setup of imagetester
Day 2
- Yesterday evening I had identified only a single untriaged openQA test failure in o3#1170170 due to missing qgis which apparently failed to be built correctly. Meanwhile DimStar couldn't leave his finger from Tumbleweed and declared the issue as ignorable so the snapshot could be released :)
- DimStar gave my newly created dedicated user "okurz-factory" additional permissions which made "1238 Tasks" show up in OBS :D Obviously most I can't or shouldn't immediately work with. However I started with a candidate that looked pretty obvious to me: sr#577043 is a package delete request for openSUSE:Leap:15.0 which is both GM and EOL. I could just leave this to a Leap RM to cleanup as well but I figured it's easy enough for myself to do and shouldn't be seen as harmful :) But I also created a feature request for OBS regarding this: gh#openSUSE/open-build-service#9070
- There are some staging projects ready to accept but we shouldn't do that now as that would cause a retrigger of the complete snapshot. We should let the snapshot of the day finish and at best be published before.
- I followed a wish and combined adi:132 and adi:13 with a small helper script snippet "adimerge" using the newly created OBS user and osc commands
- Created delete requests for compiz dependants for sr#764280 with
for i in $(dependson compiz | tail -n +2); do osc deleterequest -m "compiz has been failing to build for 6 months - time to say goodbye, can always be readded" openSUSE:Factory $i ; done - merged other adi projects
- Also declined SRs, e.g. sr#770581 due to wrong requirements (apparently untested submission). Shouldn't approve any SRs ("ever"), only help "making acceptable", e.g. fixing tests, merging staging projects after they have been assigned, etc.
- Opened idea gh#openSUSE/openSUSE-release-tools#2402 to reduce tedious manual work when doing openQA test result review where TTM is active
Day 3
oscf staging select B datefudgeworked, any later attempt failed with "403 permission denied". I then mainly did openQA test review. In the end I think I found what broke my account authentication. Somehow the config field "user" was set to "okurz" instead of "okurz-factory" in my config file I use for the special user.- Lot's of openQA tests labeled. Some fixed but there are (still or again) quite some sporadic flaky test failures
- Understanding which staging projects to touch and which are better left alone to give them a chance to finish is a challenge
Day 4
- Happily answered more requests for moving submissions around in different stagings while learning about the quirks and caveats :)
- Again finding some flaky openQA tests that could use some love, reported some tickets but achieving that the snapshots can be published
- Another day that DimStar was very helpful with good advices, explanations and mentoring hints
- Staging:H with the new MicroOS Desktop was demanding a lot of my attention with the need to fulfill new requirements for now "required" packages in Ring-1 which I did by linking packages from openSUSE:Factory to the according staging project. The according packages need to be provided in the Ring-1 project directly if or when we accept Staging:H
- Finally could do
osc staging acceptfor quite a lot of "acceptable" staging projects including 6 letter stagings, e.g. with a lot of KDE packages, MozillaThunderbird, MozillaFirefox, cmake, Mesa, ccache, redis, postgresql12, nextcloud, buildah, spyder3, telegram-desktop, nodejs12, openQA and many more
verdict
Overall this project was a very worthwile experience for myself. In before I was already aware of most of the concepts and tasks from either following on the work of others, as one of the openQA maintainers and administrators, especially for openqa.opensuse.org, as well as from submitting packages myself. Over the past week I gained insight into the process from a different, new perspective filling the knowledge gaps and experiencing necessary actions and tasks myself. I learned what are the challenges and annoyances for the openSUSE release engineers and managers from first-hand experience and can hopefully in the future help to remedy them with my further contributions. I am very grateful to the community members that supported me in my learning position and especially many thanks go to DimStar aka. Dominique Leuenberger who has been a great mentor.
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