Pietro Abate homepage

I'm going to deliver this talk at fosdem 2012, room H.1301 (CrossDistribution Devroom) at 16:30 on Sat. If you are interested, please come by. In particular I'd like to talk with all the developers out there that are using our work (of edos fame) and to discuss with them future plans to migrate their programs to the new generation of mancoosi - powered QA tools. Scroll down to get the slides .

fosdem link : http://fosdem.org/2012/schedule/event/distro_qa_tools

Abstract

FOSS distributions are increasingly over pressure to deliver stable releases including the most up to date upstream software. Time-based release strategies has exacerbated this problem putting even more pressure on QA teams. The recently concluded Mancoosi project has developed a number of tools to automatically analyse large packages collections for a range of problems, from installability checks to speculative analysis of software repositories. In this talk I'll present four command line tools to identify and correct potential problems as soon as possible during the release cycle.

In particular :

• Debcheck: This tools helps to identify all broken packages within a repository and provides a detailed explanation of the problem. This can be used to prevent shipping releases that contain packages that cannot be installed because of missing or malformed dependencies.
• Buildcheck: Given a Sources file and a set of binary repositories, this tool identifies those source packages that cannot be compiled because their build dependencies cannot be satisfied.
• Outdated: This tool identifies those broken packages that need special attention because of outdated meta-data.
• Challenged: This tool performs a speculative analysis of the repository to identify those packages that, if upgraded to a specific version, would break a large number of other packages in the repository. This tool would be particularly useful during the upgrade of a specific component to evaluate its impact on the software archive.

Most of our tools support both rpm (version 4 and 5) and deb based distributions.

The mancoosi team.