Colors of Noise

I'm often using jenkins-job-builder to automatically create jenkins jobs since writing them in YAML is more comfortable then doing large amounts of jobs in the GUI, it serves consistency and helps automation.

For views and build pipelines I so far resorted to other tools (like templates in the config management tool at use) but now there's jenkins-job-builder-addons by jimbydamonk. Creating a delivery pipeline view and the "All" view then gets as simple as:

- job:
    name: MyApp
    project-type: folder
    views:
      - delivery_pipeline:
          filter-executors: false
          filter-queue: false
          folder: true
          components:
            - name: Deploy
              first-job: app-deploy-test
          name: myapp-deploy-pipeline
          build-view-title: "MyApp Deploy Pipeline"
          number-of-pipelines: 3
          show-aggregated-pipeline: true
          number-of-columns: 1
          sorting: none
          show-avatars: false
          update-interval: 1
          allow-manual-triggers: true
          show-total-buildtime: true
          allow-rebuild: true
          allow-pipeline-start: true
      - all:
         folder: true
         name: All

This also uses the folder plugin to make sure the views end up in separate files. It currently needs a slightly patched jenkins-job-builder with this patch applied.

Putting this here since I hit jenkins-job-builder-addons mostly by accident. Once jenkins-job-builder catched up I'll look into packaging this for Debian.

ansible is a great tool for deployments. While it doesn't ship that many unit tests it comes with heaps of integration tests that can be run using:

git submodule update --init
. hacking/env-setup
cd test/integration
make

after cloning the repo from here.

However when working on individual parts one often only wants to test a single role. This can be done via:

git submodule update --init
. hacking/env-setup
cd test/integration
ansible-playbook -e @integration_config.yml -i"testhost," -c local test_filters.yml

when e.g. working on some new filers or when you want to run one of the destructive modules, test_apt in this case:

git submodule update --init
. hacking/env-setup
cd test/integration
# Destructive tests usually need sudo
sudo ansible-playbook -e @integration_config.yml -i"testhost," -c local destructive.yml --tags=test_apt

The list of available tags can be ssen in test/integration/destructive.yml.

Just putting it here since I just found myself digging this out the second time.

Debian LTS

November was the seventh month I contributed to Debian LTS under the Freexian umbrella. In total I spent ten hours working on:

• krb5: Released DLA-340-1 after applying a fix to the work done in October.

• nss: Provided patches for CVE-2015-7181 and CVE-2015-7182 for squeeze, wheezy and jessie and released DLA-354-1 for squeeze-lts for that.

  Since nss is subject to frequent security updates I wanted to spend less time doing "did I break the whole thing" testing so I added some autopkg tests that do basic certificate handling and make sure we can link a simple binary against the dev package (#806207).

  We also discussed using the same nss version in all suites on the debian-lts list. To test that path I worked on creating backports for Jessie/Wheezy/Squeeze of the current sid version. So far I tested the general feasibility and some simple upgrades.

  To be able to detect breackage more easily I enabled the internal test suite resulting in #806639. I also filed #806634 to ease backporting in the future. Packages are collected here with the sources in this (temporary) git repo. Work on this will continue in December.

Other Debian stuff

• There was no git-buildpackge upload in November but the git repository already collected some fixes and new features like building RPMs in clean chroots using mock. Patches for this were provided by Tzafrir Cohen. I've been hoping we get #775118 fixed in mock so it becomes actually useful in Debian before uploading a new gbp version.

  There's also now an example for README.source for gbp managed source packages. I'd be nice to have patches to further improve this.

  The main reason for not uploading new gbp yet is that I said at Debconf that I'll improve error recovery in gbp import-orig with the next or next next upload and that would be 0.7.1 latest. I did no get around to continue on this since Debconf though.

• I supplied a patch for pbuilder's #802800 to allow building with -g
• Uploaded libvirt 1.2.21 to unstable.