Here are some highlights from the past week discussions in Fedora which I found interesting or participated in.
Call to Action: Improving Overall Test Coverage in Fedora
I can not stress enough how important it is to further improve test coverage in Fedora! You can help too. Here's how:
- Join upstream and create a test suite for a package you find interesting;
- Provide patches - first patch came in less than 30 minutes of initial announcement :);
- Review packages in the wiki and help identify false negatives;
- Forward to people who may be interested to work on these items;
- Share and promote in your local open source and developer communities;
Auto BuildRequires
Auto-BuildRequires
is a simple set of scripts which compliments rpmbuild by
automatically suggesting BuildRequires lines for the just built package.
It would be interesting to have this integrated into Koji and/or continuous integration environment and compare the output between every two consecutive builds (iow older and newer package versions). It sounds like a good way to identify newly added or removed dependencies and update the package specs accordingly.
How To Test Fonts Packages
This is exactly what Christopher Meng asked and frankly I have no idea.
I've come across a few fonts packages (amiri-fonts, gnu-free-fonts and thai-scalable-fonts) which seem to have some sort of test suites but I don't know how they work or what type of problems they test for. On top of that all three have a different way of doing things (e.g. not using a standardized test framework or a variation of such).
I'll keep you posted on this once I manage to get more info from upstream developers.
Is URL Field in RPM Useless
So is it? Opinions here differ from totally useless to "don't remove it, I need it". However I run a small test and from 2574 RPMs on the source DVD there is around 40% of "something different than HTTP 200 OK". This means 40% potentially broken URLs!
The majority are responses in the 3XX range and only less than 10% are actual errors (4XX, 5XX, missing URLs or connection errors).
It will be interesting to see if this can be removed from rpm altogether.
I don't think it will happen soon but if we don't use it why have it there?
My script for the test is here.
Comments !