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Why You Should Use Tumbleweed

rootco.de

11–20 of 68 posts

Re: Why You Should Use Tumbleweed

#11
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a rolling release, that means each time a new version of a package is available they will try and incorporate it. Apparently the difference they have to gentoo, arch et al is that they have a large CI that actually inspects screen shots to verify that the new package didn't break anything. I run antergos (arch based) at home, having the bleeding edge is nice, but the AUR is really what seals the deal for me. Th…

CI tests as described are very good for minor patches, but new features and significant UI changes seem to require significant manual updates to tests anyway.

You'd be surprised how little a problem it is in the real world

In the case of UI changes, openQA can have it's 'needles' updated in it's webUI. Look at the new screenshot, compare to the old screenshot, tell openQA to like the new stuff, done.

In the case of functionality or workflow changes, yeah, tests need to be adapted, but the openQA test writing language is pretty human friendly, describing the steps that humans actually do, so it's not that hard to alter

And because we test at the point of submission before anything is merged to the distribution, we generally catch the behaviour changes as part of the package submission, then we have developers keen to get their stuff in the distribution happy to help tune up the tests ;)

Re: Why You Should Use Tumbleweed

#12
That does sound pretty cool.

Who owns Suse again? Do they have a social contract? How's their democratic decision making? Do they properly separate non-free software from their free packages?

- Debian User.

Re: Why You Should Use Tumbleweed

#13
post #6

Seems like a step forward in solving the "stale versus reliable" conundrum. Over the years I've repeatedly been irked by how stale the package repositories are in some distros. At the fresh end of the spectrum, I used Gentoo for a while, and I do like many things about Gentoo, but I came to the conclusion that it is essentially impossible to QA Gentoo. Plus, falling behind in Gentoo opens you to a world of hurt tryin…

zypper takes care of most of that for us - it really is an exceptional package manager We have some tests in openQA that keep an eye on upgrades, as well as some users who like to stagger their Tumbleweed updates for some weeks. I think the record I heard was like 3 months (and our gcc5 migration happened during those months), and then they upgraded with no problem

3 months? That's peanuts. Having too many Arch boxes, back in '12/'13 I had one that was 9 months behind, with the big filesystem movearound and sysvinit->systemd change happening in that period. It took a couple of hours of work, but the upgrade went through fine in the end.

I'd suggest you do automated testing of at least 6 month old system upgrades. Because users are going to do it, and much complaining will ensue when it breaks their system.

Re: Why You Should Use Tumbleweed

#15

So for every library Foo, it tracks all of the packages that depend on Foo? What if I add my own package -- do I have to tell Foo about mine as well? What if Foo's API changed or breaks my package?

Yes, the open build service takes care of that for you

You don't need to tell Foo about your package, the build service will detect those relationships

If you build against Foo, and Foo changes, the OBS will rebuild your package for you

If it breaks your package, the OBS will keep the last version published while you can debug the build failure

Re: Why You Should Use Tumbleweed

#16
post #12

That does sound pretty cool. Who owns Suse again? Do they have a social contract? How's their democratic decision making? Do they properly separate non-free software from their free packages? - Debian User.

I wrote a rather long mailinglist post that should answer a lot of those questions..

https://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-project/2016-02/msg00003...

Re: Why You Should Use Tumbleweed

#17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

zypper takes care of most of that for us - it really is an exceptional package manager We have some tests in openQA that keep an eye on upgrades, as well as some users who like to stagger their Tumbleweed updates for some weeks. I think the record I heard was like 3 months (and our gcc5 migration happened during those months), and then they upgraded with no problem

3 months? That's peanuts. Having too many Arch boxes, back in '12/'13 I had one that was 9 months behind, with the big filesystem movearound and sysvinit->systemd change happening in that period. It took a couple of hours of work, but the upgrade went through fine in the end. I'd suggest you do automated testing of at least 6 month old system upgrades. Because users are going to do it, and much complaining will ensue…

We do automated testing from our 'traditional' distributions, including versions that existed BEFORE Tumbleweed in it's current form..like 13.1, 12.3, etc..

So in that case, we're going back years ;)

Re: Why You Should Use Tumbleweed

#18
post #12

That does sound pretty cool. Who owns Suse again? Do they have a social contract? How's their democratic decision making? Do they properly separate non-free software from their free packages? - Debian User.

and one question that doesn't get answered by that link - yes, we properly separate non-free software from our free packages

Re: Why You Should Use Tumbleweed

#19
"It uses openCV and a library of reference screenshots (with areas of interest selected to allow openQA to ignore things we don’t care about) which we call ‘needles’ ..."

OpenQA is a fascinating project. The tests are written in perl and I think the OpenCV magical stuff is around the "check_screen()" function.

For example, a test for Firefox:

    x11_start_program("firefox https://html5test.com/index.html", 6, {valid => 1});

    # makes firefox as default browser

    if (check_screen('firefox_default_browser')) {
        assert_and_click 'firefox_default_browser_yes';
    }
https://github.com/os-autoinst/os-autoinst-distri-opensuse/b...

Re: Why You Should Use Tumbleweed

#20

"It uses openCV and a library of reference screenshots (with areas of interest selected to allow openQA to ignore things we don’t care about) which we call ‘needles’ ..." OpenQA is a fascinating project. The tests are written in perl and I think the OpenCV magical stuff is around the "check_screen()" function. For example, a test for Firefox: x11_start_program("firefox https://html5test.com/index.html", 6, {valid =>…

check_screen is a non-fatal check, really useful for stuff like you cite in that example "tell openQA to see if something is on the screen, then react to it"

assert_screen is it's fatal cousin "make sure the screen has this needle on it, or die"

assert_and_click is it's mouse-controlling companion, "make sure the screen has this needle on it, then click on it"

https://github.com/os-autoinst/openQA/blob/master/docs/Writi...

The above doc covers the basics, we also have a whole bunch of tutorials on YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fqvaSO6nKE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8LmqhwpVvg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EM3XmaQXcLg

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