August/November update on qa.guix.gnu.org and related things

[Christopher Baines]

Hey,

The last update I sent out was back in July [1].

1: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2023-07/msg00144.html

There have been quite a few changes over the last few months, here's a
summary of the changes:

 - QA now stores when it's submitted builds for a issue/branch and
   cancels them when they're no longer needed

 - The README is published at https://qa.guix.gnu.org/README

 - The output when applying patches is stored and displayed if there was
   a failure

 - There's a review feature for marking patches as looking good

 - There are more issue statuses and support filtering by status

 - Merged issues are now handled

 - Patches can be applied to non-master branch

 - The latest patch series are processed, rather than the latest issues

 - There's a page specifically about reproducible builds
   (qa.guix.gnu.org/reproducible-builds)


I've also been doing little bit of work towards speeding up the data
service processing revisions. I've disabled computing the system test
derivations on data.qa.guix.gnu.org as that takes a significant amount
of time, and they aren't being used yet.

The formatting linter takes quite a bit of time, and I've got an open
patch to speed it up:

  https://issues.guix.gnu.org/66796

The performance of computing cross derivations also seems like it could
be improved, I've sent some details here:

  https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2023-10/msg00257.html

# Next steps

I'm still planning to stop hosting both data.guix.gnu.org and
data.qa.guix.gnu.org at the end of the year, which is only a few weeks
away now. The qa-frontpage which runs qa.guix.gnu.org is dependent on
data.qa.guix.gnu.org. There's been some discussion of potentially moving
some or all of this to hosting organised through the project/Guix
Europe, but I'm not sure anything has happened on this yet.

I've added a few TODO's to the list in the README off the back of
discussion at the Reproducible Builds summit.

In my mind, while there's still lots to do in the qa-frontpage,
addressing problems in the data service is probably still the most
important thing to do. There's still some reliability issues to
investigate further as well as improving the performance of processing
revisions. If the data service can be sped up, QA will be able to give
feedback faster, and it'll scale to handle more patches.

I'd also really like to see some testing of the patch review feature in
QA, since I think trying to get people without commit access reviewing
patches will really help speed up getting things reviewed and merged.

Let me know if you have any comments or questions!

Thanks,

Chris

signature.asc
Description: PGP signature