Upgrading pristine-xz on jubany

[Vincent Ladeuil]

>>>>> Barry Warsaw <barry at ubuntu.com> writes:

    > On Jun 14, 2012, at 05:21 PM, Vincent Ladeuil wrote:
    >> - I'm already running successful tests inside a quantal lxc container :)

    > It has become for many of us not just a nice-to-have but a
    > must-have for Ubuntu development.

That's my understanding as well.

Here are my last achievements for the week:

- I got in touch with pristine-tar maintainers resulting in a trivial
  bugfix included in 1.25. This is a small step in getting *known* as a
  primary consumer but it also demonstrates that we can get fixes
  upstream quickly (1.25 has already been uploaded to sid and quantal).

- I got in touch with xz maintainers and a fix is on its way there
  (many thanks to Lasse Collin for its invaluable help here). This will
  require an additional fix to pristine-xz which I will submit as soon
  as I can test the xz fix).

With these fixes in place, on quantal, it should remain only < 10
pristine-tar import failures out of the current 338 on jubany. Said
failures include crazy stuff like tarballs containing files with 0000
chmod bits... I haven't looked more precisely how to fix that (and I'm
not sure it's worth digging for now).

And don't forget that when a package fail to import one release, all the
subsequent ones are blocked as well. When we fixed the bzip2 issue last
January, ~70 packages were blocked accounting for ~800 releases (don't
quote on these numbers, it's just a vague remembering but the scales
should be ok).

I also have a pending patch for bzr-builddeb that makes it easier to
test against pristine-tar failures (will probably submit an mp for that
today). Roughly, both builddeb and pristine-tar use temp files so when
the import fails, the context is lost. The fix is to save enough of the
temp files to be able to re-run pristine-tar alone without re-trying an
import (the test cycle is then reduced to seconds instead of hours).

With these 3 fixes, we'll be in a far better position to be more
reactive to pristine-tar failures in the future (running quantal will
then mean that getting fixes will be as simple as stopping the importer,
running apt-get upgrade and restart the importer).

It also means that testing can occur on quantal without the need to
install a bunch of pre-requisites in sync with what is deployed on
jubany (which can quickly get totally out of control).

I'm still investigating running a quantal lxc container right now on
jubany (any feedback about lxc on *lucid* welcome especially known
issues that has been fixed in precise).

Once I validate this we can look at deploying a quantal lxc
container on jubany.

          Vincent