December update on automating patch testing and qa.guix.gnu.org

[Christopher Baines]

Hey!

I send out the last update around a month ago [1], there was also a
thread jgart started [2].

1: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2022-11/msg00048.html
2: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2022-11/msg00134.html

As a reminder, patches sent to guix-patches now undergo some automated
testing. You can see the progress and results of this on qa.guix.gnu.org
[3].

3: https://qa.guix.gnu.org/patches

## Recent progress

I think the biggest step forward recently has been separating "blocked"
and "unknown" builds out, as that makes it clearer when the testing has
finished. This was made possible by the Guix Data Service incrementally
working out which builds are blocked as events come in, and storing this
in a way that's easy to query efficiently.

The powerpc64le-linux and i586-gnu (Hurd) builds for patches are also
now enqueued, although due to a lack of build capacity for these
systems, the results aren't factored in to the issue status yet.

I think one of the things that came up in this thread [2] is that
there's more communicating to do about qa.guix.gnu.org. I've now merged
and deployed the update to Mumi that includes a patch from Arun to start
displaying badges from qa.guix.gnu.org, so hopefully that'll help to
link up the two services.

## Next steps

The README contains a big TODO list [4], but I'll highlight some things
here.

4: https://git.cbaines.net/guix/qa-frontpage/about/

I've also made progress on moving the Git repository on to Savannah,
there's a ticket open here now [5].

5: https://savannah.nongnu.org/support/?110790

Writing a proper service for the qa-frontpage is also on my TODO list,
that will mean it won't be running in a screen session on bayfront.

I think the most important medium term goal though is to work on testing
branches (like staging, core-updates, ...). Because they're generally
more complicated changes compared to things sent to guix-patches, I
think that's where the benefits on automatically testing the changes
will be the greatest.

## How to get involved

If you're doing any patch review, consider looking at qa.guix.gnu.org!
Even if you aren't able to push patches, it can be really useful to
review them and provide feedback. There's a review checklist at the
bottom of the QA pages.

If you're looking at getting any branches merged, it would be really
useful to hear about that so the functionality for testing those
branches can be worked on.

Also, there's a whole lot to work on in the qa-frontpage codebase, so if
you're interested in that, I'm more than happy to try and help.

If you've got any comments or questions, please let me know!

Thanks,

Chris

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