[OE-core] Quality of meta-oe metadata

[Mark Hatle]

On 3/29/14, 8:31 PM, Martin Jansa wrote:
> Hi, sorry for longer e-mail, this is one of topic I would like to discuss
> on OEDAM (http://openembedded.org/wiki/OEDAM), but having some feedback and
> thoughts in advance will be very useful.
>
> As people can notice from my "State of bitbake world" e-mails or
> http://www.openembedded.org/wiki/Bitbake_World_Status
> we never had "green" builds. There are always 20+ failed tasks in those
> big builds and just reading the numbers isn't good indicator of quality,
> because sooner you break something in dependency tree, fewer recipes will
> be actually tested, so fewer failed tasks often means that something
> important is broken.

...

> 3) OE releases work great and don't invalidate sstate signatures so often, so my
>     feeling is that most developers and projects are just using releases and
>     less and less people do CI. People will start complaining that something
>     is broken in meta-oe only when they are upgrading their project from 1.5 to
>     1.6 when 1.6 is released and that could be too late for fixing meta-oe
>     issues.

I agree, the success of what we're doing is certainly causing us 'different' 
problems.  :)

> What I'm trying to do with it:
>
> a) sending those e-mails and updating wiki, so that people can easily find
>     if some build failure is common or something which happens only for them
>     (something like oestats-client.bbclass page was providing in oe-classic)
>     It also includes log of QA issues which are usually easy to fix and great
>     way for new people to learn something about OE.
> b) trying to refuse all patches which cause new world issue (or new QA
>     warn/err) - sometimes missed in logs, because it's often "hidden" by some
>     other issue and hard to compare 40 issues from previous build with 38
>     from current.
>     Also the issues are often triggered later by changes somewhere else...
> c) fixing build/qa issues in recipes I've never used or don't even have
>     hardware to test - just based on assumption that something which builds
>     is better than broken build, even when it can have some issues in runtime.
> d) contacting people who added the recipe which is now failing, often
>     without reply for months even when I try it multiple times :/

I agree with all of the above.  In fact I suspect you are going above and beyond 
what you really need to.  Kudos for that BTW.

> e) moving to "nonworking" directory to mark it as "known-to-be-broken",
>     last resort for recipes where the fix is complicated and it's not known
>     if someone is actually using it (because it was broken for months and
>     nobody replied).
>     + easy to find them, because they are still in repository (instead of
>       git rm + revert when someone fixes it)
>     - layer index probably doesn't find them, because "nonworking" directory
>       level isn't in BBFILES, so maybe meta-broken or meta-nonworking would be
>       better
>     ? some recipes are "broken" just because their dependency is broken, what
>       to do with such recipe, I usually just say that in commit message when
>       I'm moving them to "nonworking" with their broken dep.

Have you considered using the blacklist system for this?

You could do something like:

conf/layer.conf:
include ${LAYERDIR}/conf/broken.inc

conf/broken.inc:

<can we ensure the blacklist system is in the system>

BROKENMSG_layername = "The recipe is disabled due to a build failure.  If you 
need this recipe, or have gotten it to work.  Please submit patches to <path>. 
Otherwise this recipe will be removed in the future."

# Recipe FOO is broken as of 2014-03-14, see ...
PNBLACKLIST[FOO] = "${BROKENMSG_layername}"

# Recipe BAR is broken as of 2013-06-13, see ...
PNBLACKLIST[BAR] = "${BROKENMSG_layername}"


Then after a given amount of time, say one year? on the broken list -- we can 
then remove the items.

If the format of the comments is such that it can be easily parsed, then we can 
even automate tracking of these things.

(In cases where dependencies are causing the breakage, the message cause be 
augmented with that information as well...)

The advantage of the blacklist system is that if a user tries to use the recipe 
they will hopefully see the blacklist message, it prevents having to git mv 
recipes, and should be easier for people to find/fix the bad code via a simple 
patch.  (And hopefully easier to remove old cruft!)

--Mark

> What can we do better? How to motivate more people to do CI and send fixes?
> When we get to "green" state it will be easier to quickly spot new issues and
> easier to fix them, because it will be clear what's causing them.
>
>
>