[OpenAFS] buildbot and packages

[Doug Hirsch]

Troy,

I'm unclear I've offered you anything you can actually use.  Mostly,
I'm offering you the reality check of a non-programmer, a Macbook with
me on the road and a stale Debian box powered down back at home.
You'll have to steer me through downloading, installing and using
anything that's not on a stock Mac running Mac OS 10.6.8, or bringing
the Linux box up to whatever environment you want once I get home.
Most of my other machines run Windows, although I have a couple of G4
Mac mini's hanging around for fun.  Your average college student will
not have much more to offer you, so I'm offering a chance for you to
define what you could actually accomplish harnessing thousands of us
"amicable zombies" with limited time, experience and resources.  If it
will help, I'm willing to install some virtualization package on the
Macbook, but will need guidance.  I also need to keep a lid on my time
commitment, so assume no more than 5 hours a week from me, with an
extra 5 hours this week to start up.  If you can make use of that, let
me know and I'll wander over to bitbucket.org.  What I want is someone
to talk me through getting OpenAFS going in my personal environment.
I'm unclear how much value you'll get out of me on just five hours a
week and 1.5 machines.  I've written proposals and defended engineers
building test environments, among other things, but I haven't gotten
my hands into code for many years, so I'm sure you'll be surprised by
what cultural assumptions you discover I don't know.  I see and
appreciate your energy and optimism, while I think you're
underestimating what you're asking.  But if you can make something
work with limited commitments from others, I'm happy to go along to
see what we can contribute to the community together.

Doug

On Sat, Sep 15, 2012 at 10:34 PM, Troy Benjegerdes <hozer@hozed.org> wrote:
> I'll buy that for a few emails.
>
> Let's start by having you take a look at:
>
> https://bitbucket.org/dahozer/tfs
>
> There are tabs for issues & wikis, so sign up for a bitbucket account and
> ask some questions there, so we don't spam the -devel list with lots of
> 'how do I xyz' questions
>
> For the openafs-devel list, please let the list know what resources/
> platforms you have for testing, and I'd like to hear from the list what
> could I write some tests for that could utilize those resources.
>
>
> On Sat, Sep 15, 2012 at 09:44:07PM -0700, Doug Hirsch wrote:
>> Troy,
>>
>> If you set this up, I'm willing to be your guinea pig.  It'll cost you
>> enough support and/or documentation to get me over initial learning
>> curve.
>>
>> Doug
>>
>> On 9/15/12, Troy Benjegerdes <hozer@hozed.org> wrote:
>> > Sometimes I think we get hung up on 'good testing' vs having *something*.
>> >
>> > The last time I worked for someone else, it was writing test code for
>> > Cray's
>> > supercomputer systems. You don't get much more complex than a machine
>> > with 30,000 cores in which 'acceptable' performance is defined as 'pushing
>> > the system to the point right before it collapses into an unusable heap',
>> > and it's got to run a workload of hundreds of thousands of the world's most
>> > complex and numerically sensitive computational codes.
>> >
>> > And I'd hazard a guess that 3/4 of the system problems were with the
>> > filesystem
>> > (Lustre most often). I've also heard a pretty good argument that the reason
>> >
>> > Cray went bankrupt a couple of times is they over-tested. If you did get a
>> > machine back in the YMP days, it was very well tested, but the price showed
>> >
>> > it, and clusters ate their market.
>> >
>> >
>> > Maybe we don't have money.. But how many users of AFS are there. I'm not
>> > talking
>> > companies, I'm talking people.. specifically, bored college students. How
>> > many
>> > people have used AFS at a major university, and might help us out doing
>> > manual
>> > testing if we give them a framework?
>> >
>> > To paraphrase the .. well.. chief cat herder .. of the most widely deployed
>> > operating system ever (Linux),
>> > "With enough QA testers, all bugs are shallow"
>> >
>> > On Fri, Sep 14, 2012 at 04:42:37PM -0500, David Boyes wrote:
>> >> > In this case I think you are low-balling the estimate.  To do it right
>> >> > it isn't
>> >> > sufficient to test one build against itself.  You need to test new
>> >> > clients
>> >> > against a range of old servers and vice versa in a constrained
>> >> > environment.
>> >> > It is necessary to be able to identify when a change has an adverse
>> >> > performance impact as well as accuracy.  There is a need to be able to
>> >> > introduce intentional errors at various points in the protocol.  Just
>> >> > the
>> >> > hardware costs are mid 5 digits and the software development is
>> >> > significantly more than that.
>> >>
>> >>  I agree --  if you were starting from scratch, you're probably right.
>> >>
>> >> But, a) I wasn't starting from scratch, so the additional equipment for
>> >> adding the AFS framework stuff was about what I quoted, and b) I was
>> >> discussing our tooling and test setup, not the general case.
>> >> We reused existing tooling in a number of places, and layered the AFS
>> >> component onto that. We do this kind of thing for other software, so we
>> >> had a decent baseline to start from.
>> >>
>> >> Solid QA infrastructure -- especially for complex systems -- isn't simple
>> >> or cheap; there we agree wholeheartedly.
>> >>
>> >>
>> >>
>> >> :??
>> > _______________________________________________
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>> >