[lsb-discuss] LSB conf call notes for 2008-10-15

Jeff Licquia jeff at licquia.org
Wed Oct 15 09:02:35 PDT 2008


Attendees: Jeff, Jesper, Russ, Mats, Darren, Ron, Robert, Kay, Stew,
Alexey, Vladimir

LSB 4.0.  Jeff: builders were the biggest problem.  Mats: ia32 issue
that was on IRC; some of the builds for that architecture weren't built
off the tags, and are too old.  Jeff: any other archs?  Mats: ok on
x86-64; don't have results on anything else.  Darren: what's the
problem?  Mats: dtk-manager doesn't pick up on the cairo test journal.
Darren: Jiri is running tests with the beta now; should be able to
report if it's a problem.  Jeff: can those results be sent to us?
Darren: not a problem, except workload.  Jeff: can do automatically.

Jeff: new autotest results page.  Would like to see people contribute
results, request new reports.

Jeff: any worrisome results?

Jeff: back to builders.  Clearly, it's too fragile.  What to do?  Mats:
question is too complicated; it doesn't work, but what doesn't work is
an issue.  Jeff: start from scratch?  Russ: could also refactor.  Mats:
we have a sense of where the problems are.  Uploads fail much of the
time.  Another weakness: first phase is to build the development
environment, and have it replace itself.  The sequence is tricky, and
can fail.  Russ: tinderbox-type environment?  Cascading change issue;
might be able to catch these problems earlier.  Jeff: also, keeping
chroots around is fragile; keeping pristine tarballs for builds is
better.  Mats: should kick off a project to improve this.  Jeff: builder
doesn't probably take advantage of new SDK capabilities.  Stew: that
part doesn't fail as much.  Mats: would be cool to use virtual machines
as builders; could do copy-on-write off a pristine builder and throw
changes away.  Jeff: how do we kick off the project?  Use an
architecture as a guinea pig?  Mats: if we can build without pushing,
then we can test without forcing changes into production.  Russ:
conflating chroots with build instance; using copy-on-write.  Where is
the proposal?  Jeff: where is your stuff?  Russ: old code is at
ftp://ftp.owlriver.com/pub/mirror/ORC/ORCrebuild/  Personally uses
mezzanine, centos uses mach.  Always build packages, which may be a
discipline change.  Jeff: also, don't have a good virtual machine
situation for some archs.  Russ: IBM demonstrated something; ia64 is
almost there, and s390 is there.  Kay: have a program for creating VMs
for ChipHopper people.  It's a bit complicated.  Russ: can use snapshots
of VMs for creating new ones, instead of "stock" images or new installs.

Jeff: schedule.  Could gain time.  Who?  Michael and I?  Mats: would
like to volunteer, but lots on plate; in particular, the 3.2 refresh.
Would like to be involved.  Jeff: could make our main job, but pull Mats
in for discrete tasks.

Kay: update on Java stuff?  Jeff: no progress in a month.  Kay: even if
someone packages Java with their app, the fact that there's no
LSB-certified JDK is a problem.  Russ: problem with testing.
End-of-lifing "100% Pure Java" is very troubling.  No good test
situation.  Robert: should push on both ends: Java in LSB, and
LSB-certified Java.  Kay: not given up on certified Java side.  Jeff:
need to do the vote yet on trial-use, but we're pretty sure Java isn't
ready.  Robert: maybe after the 4.0 hump.  Russ: and making sure we have
application testing is important.

Russ: concerned that the vote on trial-use status for Java will not
happen the way we expect.  Jeff: have been non-committal, but most of
the people involved have been agreeing that Java should be trial use.
Russ: yes, but what about ballot surprises?  Jeff: will probably put out
a position paper on the issues to vote on, and will include the
technical recommendation of the LSB workgroup and Sun.



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