QA meet, Amaya, Skolelinux party

Last Saturday, Colin Watson, Daniel Silverstone, Vince Sanders and got together for a Debian hacking session. I used the time to work on some QA scripts. First, I adapted some scripts to use Andreas Barth's new LDAP interface for the Bug Tracking System. I also adapted another script and resurrected the weekly WNPP postings. Second, I improved some scripts and worked on some items I had on my TODO list for about two years. Later this week, I moved qa.debian.org from klecker to merkel. merkel has or will have a full BTS, FTP and ftp-master mirror, has more disk and memory than klecker, and is not restricted (which means people can access the MIA database again).

The weekend before, Amaya was in Cambridge, and I showed her around the city. In the evening, we went to a Debian meeting, and we introduced her to Mao (a card game). It was great fun. Photos are available in my photo gallery. I finally took the time to actually write some content for my homepage, and added a photo gallery.

This evening I'm flying to Oslo in order to attend the Skolelinux party which takes place tomorrow.

mips autobuilding and old packages

Yesterday night, I started autobuilding the archive on mips. I sorted the sources files by age and started with the packages uploaded longest ago. I mainly have two aims: First, like others, I want to autobuild the archive in order to see whether packages still build. Second, from a QA perspective, I'm mostly interested in packages which have not been updated for a while, and I thought autobuilding them would give me a good excuse to look at them in more detail. Over night, about 650 packages were built, and I reported about 10 build failures (mostly out-of-date config.guess files from 2001 which no longer work on mips).

The more interesting part, however, is the sheer number of crappy packages. I know there is a high number of badly maintained packages in Debian, but I was (again) surprised to see how many. There were easily 10-15 packages which said "initial upload", i.e. their last upload was their first upload. First uploaded in 2002, and no single upload since then. Incidentally, in most cases it seems upstream is inactive too (And no, this is not a good reason for not uploading new versions of the package since Debian Policy changes all the time). I really wonder if we had to have those packages in the archive in the first place, and I'll investigate to find out if some of them can be removed. (Fortunately, some have never been part of a stable release, and its still time to get them removed before sarge becomes the next stable release.)

Also, I (again) realized that it is very hard to automate certain QA functions because the right information is not easily available. However, I finally got annoyed enough about the current state to actually do something about it. I will therefore implement a system which will record important data in a way that allows us to automate more QA activities like finding out-of-date or badly maintained packages. More on this on -qa soon.