Server Bug Zapping: eucalyptus and euca2ools

So far, the KVM and Samba bug zapping weeks have been a success!

Next week, we will be focusing on Eucalyptus, Euca2ools, and UEC in general. In fact, Mathias Gug, Scott Moser, and I will be on-site at Eucalyptus Systems in Santa Barbara, California. We're going to spend the whole week working on UEC, ensuring that the Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Cloud offering is the best damn Linux hosted Cloud Computing platform in the industry.

Call For Participation

If you have any vested interest in the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud, please give us hand next week!

Take a look at the open bugs against:

• eucalyptus
• euca2ools
• cloud-init
• cloud-utils

Help us reproduce those, or let us know if they're fixed. Come hang out in #ubuntu-server next week.

:-Dustin

Server Bug Zapping: KVM in Retrospective

Big thanks to those who participated in this week's Ubuntu Server Bug Zapping effort on Ubuntu's KVM!

During the course of this week, we reduce the total number of open bugs against the qemu-kvm package in Ubuntu from 48 on Monday to 24 today. That's 24 bugs closed, slicing our open bug list in half!

Torsten Spindler was an all-star, helping triage, reproduce, and confirm fixes for quite a number of bugs, and thanks to Brian Thomason for the documentation patch. Also, thanks to Anthony Liguori (QEMU's maintainer) for meeting me at Opal Divine's and helping triage a bunch of the remaining open bugs.

I didn't get to spend quite as much time on this effort this week as I hoped, so I libvirt didn't get the love it deserves yet. I'll plan on working on libvirt in one of the next few weeks.

As for next week, stay tuned to Thierry Carrez' blog, as he's going to announce the next Bug Zapping target.

Cheers,
:-Dustin

Server Bug Zapping: KVM Day 1

Server Bug Zapping, Day 1, Week 1: KVM Triage .... Done!

See:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/qemu-kvm

At the start of the day today, there were 48 open bugs against qemu-kvm in Ubuntu. And as of this post, there are now 31 open bugs.

I performed 2 qemu-kvm uploads today, fixing a configuration regression with alsa/pulseaudio and a broken manpage symlink (really low hanging fruit).

Most of the 17 bugs closed were bugs that we could confirm as fix-released, which is a huge compliment to the the upstream QEMU and KVM communities.

There are now 7 bugs in the triaged state, which means that we at least know exactly what needs to be done to solve the problem. If you think you can fix any of those triaged bugs in the next 24 hours, please assign the bug to yourself and come talk to us in #ubuntu-server. We'd love to have your contribution!

But even if you're not ready to start hacking on the qemu-kvm source code, you can still help. There are now 11 bugs in the incomplete state, and . Almost all of these need someone to try and reproduce the issue with the latest Lucid qemu-kvm 0.12.3 package. If you can lend a hand there and help confirm that these bugs are either fixed or still broken in Lucid, that would be very helpful too!

Finally, a big thanks to today's most active Bug Zappers: Torsten Spindler and Andres Rodriguez!

Cheers,
:-Dustin

Server Bug Zapping Call for Participation!

In October 2009, just before the release of Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic), Mathias Gug, Dan Nurmi, and I holed up for a couple of very long days, working on the Ubuntu Eucalyptus package. Over the course of 72 hours, we uploaded Eucalyptus 7 times, fixing over 30 bugs! While Mathias, Dan, and I were co-located, we were also greatly assisted by Thierry Carrez (located +7 hours ahead) and community member Joseph Salisbury. Thierry and Joe helped tremendously with regression testing of the rapid fire uploads, triaging and squashing any new issues as they arose. This "push" was essential to delivering UEC for Ubuntu 9.10!

Well, the Server Team is going to do it again, for Ubuntu 10.04, and covering several other important server packages in addition to Eucalyptus, and we're hoping to get your help this time!

We're calling this effort Server Bug Zapping. The plans are detailed here:

• https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ServerLucidBugZapping

The idea is that rather than waiting around for bugs to "get fixed" ...
We're going to take a more proactive approach ...

We're arming a platoon of Ubuntu Server Developers, Community Members, and Triagers, deploying them out on timed, coordinated missions, focusing our efforts on a particular packages for about a week at a time.

The first mission commences next week, March 1 - 5, 2010, targets our Virtualization stack, focusing on:

• qemu-kvm
• lxc
• libvirt

Anthony Liguori (upstream QEMU maintainer) will be helping us a bit next week, too.

If you have a particular interest in seeing these packages solid and successful in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Server, then please lend a hand! Even if you're not a developer, we need quite a bit of help triaging the bugs, testing the new Lucid packages, confirming old bugs against the latest code, and verifying the the latest code fixes others!

Here's the plan:

• Monday - total bug triage
  • prioritize all bugs according to a defined formula
  • confirm/reproduce any bugs in the "new" state
  • triage any bugs in the confirmed state, ie, identify the problem, test workarounds or solutions
  • expire any bugs that are invalid
  • fix-release any bugs that cannot be reproduced on the latest code
  • assign yourself (or others) triaged bugs that they can fix
  • time permitting, start working on fixes
• Tuesday
  • bzr branch (or apt-get source) the latest lucid code
  • work on fixes, pushing to lp:~yourname/thepackage/bugnumber
  • build a package in your PPA for testing
  • get some else to verify your PPA build
  • uploader will roll all fixes into an upload for that day
• Wednesday
  • same as Tuesday
• Thursday
  • same as Tuesday, rolling toward a "final" release by the end of the day
• Friday
  • Comprehensive regression testing
  • Generate status report on total uploads, bugs triaged, bugs fixed, participation
  • Post to ubuntu-server@ mailing list and the ubuntu-server blog

If you would like to get involved, please:

1. Join the ~bug-zappers team in Launchpad.net
2. Subscribe to the specification and the blueprint
3. Communicate with us in #ubuntu-server on irc.freenode.net
4. Participate in the triage on Monday, and the bug fixing/testing Tuesday - Friday, from March 1st - April 8th

Finally, the schedule of targeted packages is not yet set in stone. The only two that are confirmed right now are March 1-5 (qemu-kvm, lxc, libvirt), and March 22-26 (eucalyptus, euca2ools). If you have suggestions of packages we should consider targeting, please let us know on the Ubuntu-Server mailing list. Please consider packages that meet the following criteria:

• heavily used, high value
  
• large number of (fixable or un-triaged) bugs
• active upstream
• and perhaps an upstream that's interested in participating in a week of bug triage/fixing
  

Cheers,
:-Dustin