On Fri, 2022-09-02 at 08:37 +0000, Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek wrote:

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Now, because I glued openQA to the critpath because it was handy, there are two sets of consequences to a package being in critical path:

1. Tighter Bodhi requirements
2. openQA tests are run, and results gate the update (except Rawhide)

So, one of the implicit questions here is, is it OK to keep twinning these two sets of consequences, or should we split them up? Splitting them up kinda implies answer 2) from my original mail: "Keep the current "critical path" concept but define a broader group of "gated packages" somewhere". Because we would then need some new concept that isn't "critical path". As I said, that's more *work* - it'd require us to write new code in several places[0]. Even if we decide it'd be nice to do this, is it nice *enough* to be worth doing that work?

I'd still vote for keeping a single critpath list and using it as "the list of packages that require extra care and testing".

As you describe, the original meaning of critpath has shifted, but it's because the way we do updates and QA has also shifted. Doing gating tests for a package seems much more useful than just keeping it longer in 'updates-testing' in hope that somebody discovers an important regresion in the second week.

Well, there's a caveat there - openQA doesn't test everything. On the whole we cover quite a lot with the set of tests that gets run on updates, but there's certainly lots of potential for there to be important bugs it misses, that a human tester might catch. So I think there is still a case for the higher karma requirements too.

So yeah, I don't think it makes sense to do the extra work to split the concepts. Also because we have way too many concepts and processes in Fedora already.

On the whole, though, I agree with you. I just don't trust my own opinion because it's obviously biased by what's convenient for me. :D

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If we don't think it's worth doing that work, then we're kinda stuck with openQA glomming onto the critpath definition to decide which updates to test and gate, because I don't have any other current viable choices for that, really. And we'd have to figure out a critpath definition that's as viable as possible for both purposes.

BTW, one other thought I've had in relation to all this is that we could enhance the current critpath definition somewhat. Right now, it's built out of package groups in comps which are kinda topic-separated: there's a critpath-kde, a critpath-gnome, a critpath-server, and so on. But the generated critical path package list is a monolith: it doesn't distinguish between a package that's on the GNOME critpath and a package that's on the KDE critpath, you just get a big list of all critpath packages. It might be nice if we actually did distinguish between those - the critpath definition could keep track of which critpath topic(s) a package is included in, and Bodhi could display that information in the web UI and provide it via the API. That way manual testers could get a bit more info on why a package is critpath and what areas to test, and openQA could potentially target its test runs to conserve resources a bit, though this might require a bit more coding work on the gating stuff now I think about it.

That sounds useful. We only need a volunteer to figure out the details and do the work ;)

I actually did a huge rewrite of the thing that generates the critpath data this week, and it probably wouldn't be tooooo much work, honestly. The most annoying bit would be the Bodhi frontend stuff, but that's because I'm bad at frontend dev in general. :P But yeah, this is definitely off in sky-castle land. I'll add it to my ever-growing list of sky-castle projects to do when I get a couple of years of spare time...