I’m on my way home from Düsseldorf where I attended the LinuxCon Europe and Linux Plumber conferences. I was quite surprised how huge LinuxCon was, there were about 1.500 people there! Certainly much more than last year in New Orleans. Containers (in both LXC and docker flavors) are the Big Thing everybody talks about and works with these days; there was hardly a presentation where these weren’t mentioned at all, and (what felt like) half of the presentations were either how to improve these, or how to use these technologies to solve problems. ... Read More

It’s great to see more and more packages in Debian and Ubuntu getting an autopkgtest. We now have some 660, and soon we’ll get another ~ 4000 from Perl and Ruby packages. Both Debian’s and Ubuntu’s autopkgtest runner machines are currently static manually maintained machines which ache under their load. They just don’t scale, and at least Ubuntu’s runners need quite a lot of handholding. This needs to stop. To quote Tim “The Tool Man” Taylor: We need more power! ... Read More

Last week’s autopkgtest 3.5 release (in Debian sid and Ubuntu Utopic) brings several new features which I’d like to announce. Tests that reboot For testing low-level packages like init or the kernel it is sometimes desirable to reboot the testbed in the middle of a test. For example, I added a new boot_and_services systemd autopkgtest which configures grub to boot with systemd as pid 1, reboots, and then checks that the most important services like lightdm, D-BUS, NetworkManager, and cron come up as expected. ... Read More

I have used LaTeX and latex-beamer for pretty much my entire life of document and presentation production, i. e. since about my 9th school grade. I’ve always found the LaTeX syntax a bit clumsy, but with good enough editor shortcuts to insert e. g. \begin{itemize} \item...\end{itemize} with just two keystrokes, it has been good enough for me. A few months ago a friend of mine pointed out pandoc to me, which is just simply awesome. ... Read More

Yesterday’s autopkgtest 3.2 release brings several changes and improvements that developers should be aware of. Cleanup of CLI options, and config files Previous adt-run versions had rather complex, confusing, and rarely (if ever?) used options for filtering binaries and building sources without testing them. All of those (--instantiate, --sources-tests, --sources-no-tests, --built-binaries-filter<code>, <code>--binaries-forbuilds, and --binaries-fortests) now went away. Now there is only -B/--no-built-binaries left, which disables building/using binaries for the subsequent unbuilt tree or dsc arguments (by default they get built and their binaries used for tests), and I added its opposite --built-binaries for completeness (although you most probably never need this). ... Read More

We currently use completely different methods and tools of building test beds and running tests for Debian vs. Click packages, for normal uploads vs. CI airline landings vs. upstream project merge proposal testing, and keep lots of knowledge about Click package test metadata external and not easily accessible/discoverable. Today I released autopkgtest 3.0 (and 3.0.1 with a few minor updates) which is a major milestone in unifying how we run package tests both locally and in production CI. ... Read More

Hot on the heels of my previous annoucement of my systemd PPA for trusty, I’m now happy to announce that the latest systemd 204-10ubuntu1 just landed in Utopic, after sorting out enough of the current uninstallability in -proposed. The other fixes (bluez, resolvconf, lightdm, etc.) already landed a few days ago. Compared to the PPA these have a lot of other fixes and cleanups, due to the excellent hackfest that we held last weekend. ... Read More

On the last UDS we talked about migrating from upstart to systemd to boot Ubuntu, after Mark announced that Ubuntu will follow Debian in that regard. There’s a lot of work to do, but it parallelizes well once developers can run systemd on their workstations or in VMs easily and the system boots up enough to still be able to work with it. So today I merged our systemd package with Debian again, dropped the systemd-services split (which wasn’t accepted by Debian and will be unnecessary now), and put it into my systemd PPA. ... Read More

Our current autopkgtest machinery uses Jenkins (a private and a public one) and lots of “rsync state files between hosts”, both of which have reached a state where they fall over far too often. It’s flakey, hard to maintain, and hard to extend with new test execution slaves (e. g. for new architectures, or using different test runners). So I’m looking into what it would take to replace this with something robust, modern, and more lightweight. ... Read More

Today’s autopilot release provides a new feature for test case writers. Unless the widget you want to test has a direct object name (GtkBuilder ID/Qt objectName), it is often not that easy to find a widget in a deeply nested hierarchy in autopilot vis. With the new version, if you have some parent widget (like the containing dialog) w in your test, you can now call w.print_tree() to dump the paths and properties of that widget and all its children to stdout. ... Read More