sent to d-d-a. ---

Subject: Bits from the Extremadura QA meeting

15 developers gathered in Mérida (Spain) during the last week-end for a Quality Assurance meeting, part of the series of meetings sponsored by the Junta de Extremadura[0]. We really want to thank the Junta de Extremadura, and in particular César Gómez, for organizing this meeting.

At the same time and place, but in another dimension, a Debian VOIP meeting took place. Sadly, we don't really know what happened there, but one day the phone will ring, and we will know.

If you have questions or suggestions about specific topics, feel free to ask on debian-qa@lists.debian.org or #debian-qa.
PTS improvements
================
Several improvements to the PTS have been worked on. Most of them add the presentation of per-package information in the per-package HTML page of the PTS; notably the following information are now shown and weren't before:
- Homepage field in the "other links" section
- presence of a `DM-Upload-Allowed: yes` field in the "general information" section
- presence of the package maintainer in the LowThresholdNmu wiki page on wiki.debian.org, still in the "general information" section
- hyperlink pointing to the SvnBuildStat package database in the "other links" section

On the look and feel side some information has been compacted in order to try having more information fit into a single screen. Also a couple of new alternative CSSs have been developed and one will be applied as the new default soon.

Some functional improvements have been made as well: each package page has now an RSS feed containing the same information of the "latest news" section. Also, a draft implementation of a SOAP interface exporting the per-package PTS information has been developed and will be documented/announced separately soon.

BAd PAckages SEarch
===================
BAPASE combines several metrics into a flexible scoring system to help identify packages that are not properly maintained, or became useless. It then allows to track them through the process described in [1]. More information will follow on BAPASE when it will be ready for widespread use.

Piuparts
========
No real results are ready to be published now, but we have made some great plans and actually started implementing them. The current version of piuparts will be further enhanced and a rewrite is planned. The machine piuparts.cs.helsinki.fi has been turned into a XEN host using LVM, so that in the near future developers can login there and run piuparts in clean and fast XEN environments. That machine will also run piuparts continously, and those results will be displayed in the PTS. See http://wiki.debian.org/piuparts for details.

svnbuildstat
============
The goal is to provide a service for building packages and show statistics about lintian/linda/piuparts checks, the source package is automatically downloaded from VCS repositories or provided by the user directly. The current tool is svn centric but the devel release already support git and other as well. There are already around 1600 packages in the system, there is also a link from PTS page to svnbuildstat. The idea is to provide easy to use buildbots, based on pbuilder. We implemented a patch (#453710) for pbuilder to terminate the build if the memory/disk is running low. The service could be used not only in the spirit of the Ubuntu's Personal Package Archives, but also to check all packages in VCS repositories.
See http://svnbuildstat.debian.net/ and http://wiki.debian.org/svnbuildstat for details.

Ubuntu and Debian QA collaboration
==================================

Lars Wirzenius talked about what the Ubuntu QA does, and suggested ways in which Ubuntu and and Debian can collaborate in QA. Primarily this means, for now, development of tools for QA, and the currently most important one is piuparts (see above).

BOFs
====
Several other topics were discussed during BOFs, including:
- Better handling of orphaned packages
- piuparts future developments
- MIA process improvements (more on that later on d-d-a)
- buildd log processing: http://wiki.debian.org/AutomaticBuildLogProcessing
- svnbuildstat
- Ubuntu and Debian QA collaboration
- tools for large-scale QA tests and bug reporting
- Making Debian-QA sexier to attract new contributors

Various tasks
=============
- bug reporting, bug fixing
- MIA processing
- lintian hacking (lots of bugs closed and new tests added, we are now further down the road in making linda completly useless/deprecated)
- dak patches. namely one that lets dak add correct headers to outgoing mails so utf8 displays nicely and one that lets dak not break if you have one gpg subkey expired but sign with another, not expired ones. Both patches have been applied by the ftpmasters in the meantime, as well as another one, which helps processing NEW.
- much improved script for http://ftp-master.debian.org/removals.html , dealing with the weird removal bug titles some people use
- several loldebian posts
- "Learning Frenglish and Spanglish BOF" during dinnner
- Holger Levsen worked about half the time of his stay in Merida on the r1 release of Debian Edu, which will be deployed in schools in Extremadura beginning with the end of this year. See http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/PressReleases/PressRelease_DebianEdu-3.0r1_Terra and http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/LinEx2DebianEdu-Roadmap

[0] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2007/07/msg00002.html
[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2007/10/msg00406.html

Fun & Pictures
==============
We had lots! See for example:

http://loldebian.wordpress.com/2007/11/29/i-has-no-runin-dpl/
http://loldebian.wordpress.com/2007/11/30/qa-i-haz/
http://loldebian.wordpress.com/2007/12/01/56/
http://ondrejcertik.blogspot.com/2007/11/debian-meeting-in-merida-spain.html
http://ondrejcertik.blogspot.com/2007/12/merida.html
http://ondrejcertik.blogspot.com/2007/12/mrida-remaining-photo.html