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 -- This life is a test. It is only a test. Had this been an actual life, you would have received further instructions as to what to do and where to go. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org