[opensuse-factory] Closing the Ring

13 May 2014

      Dear Factory Users and Contributors,

If you attended my OSC14 talk (or watched the video), you will know that
we're cooking Factory following a different receipt than the past
years. No unstable ingredients, replacing experiments with openQA.

While the first steps have proven their benefits in avoiding
regressions, I had the feeling in Dubrovnik that we need to go
further to make it more obvious to Factory users that Factory is a
tested rolling release and no longer a dumping group of experiments.

So let me share some more background with you how Factory is developed
now, because most of it is pretty transparent to you (for now):

1. Joe submits a package from the devel project to Factory (no change
  there)
2. Several reviewers are added and have a veto right: legal,
  factory-auto, opensuse-review-team, repo-checker (still no change)
3. One more reviewer is added now: factory-staging. This reviewer waits
  for the staging master to decide if the package needs staging. There
  are 2 reasons for a package to require staging: it's in a ring project
  or belongs to a larger group of packages that need to be integrated
  together.
4. A staging project will build a group of related or unrelated packages
  and create 2 DVDs from it. One smaller one that can only test
  "minimal X" and one with the desktops.
5. Those DVDs are synced to openqa.opensuse.org and are tested there
  in various setups. Right now it's 5 setups for one staging prj.
6. Only if all packages in the staging prj build and all setups are
  tested without flaw, the group of requests that make up a staging
  project is accepted into factory *as one*.
7. Packages not in rings will be accepted whenever there is one staging
  project to be accepted.
8. As soon as Factory has built all media (2 DVD, 6 Live CD, 2 NET iso
  and one FTP tree), it's copied as snapshot into
  openSUSE:Factory:ToTest. This project basically keeps copies of one
  specific set of ISOs, so Factory can integrate new stuff while the
  next steps happen
9. openqa.opensuse.org syncs these snapshots and tests even more
  scenarios on the real thing. As this can easily be the combination of
  several staging projects, there might be new bugs appearing and it's
  the first time e.g. Live media are tested.
  See e.g. http://s.kulow.org/20140510 for a test summary of one such
  snapshot. As you can easily see, there is a lot to test, so it can
  easily take a day to pass the tests.
10. Once openqa blessed the build, we will publish
  openSUSE:Factory:ToTest into download.opensuse.org/factory
11. Users enjoy a tested Factory

The whole stunt has several implications:
 - If your package is in a staging prj and the staging prj has a
   problem, you will have to take care the staging prj as one succeeds
   to get your update into Factory. We're working on getting the
   notifications of progress in your mailbox.
 - openqa.opensuse.org will be more central to the whole development
   cycle, not just for releases.
 - Factory snapshots will happen less often, but if they happen they
   will have a good chance to work properly for you.
 - We will need to work from here to add more tests that make sense
   to avoid common regressions

Now I want to hear about your experiences and expectations.

Greetings, Stephan

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Stephan Kulow

Alberto Planas Dominguez

Felix Miata

Michal Hrusecky

C

Stephan Kulow

C

Richard Brown

Martin Schlander

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