[PureOS] Laniakea Python version is now online!

[Matthias Klumpp]

Am Do., 2. Mai 2019 um 21:23 Uhr schrieb Jeremiah C. Foster
<jeremiah.foster at puri.sm>:
>
> On Wed, 2019-05-01 at 23:53 +0200, Matthias Klumpp wrote:
> > Hello!
> > Since last week, all of PureOS infrastructure is now switched to the
> > latest, mostly Python-based version of Laniakea[1].
>
> This is great news. Congratulations Matthias!

It's a major milestone, and I am incredibly happy about the reduced
maintenance burden :-)

> > Laniakea also contains a message-bus based on ZeroMQ and JSON to let
> > modules running on other machines know about changes and react to
> > events when running in a more isolated environment. This also allows
> > notifications via email or Matrix.
>
> Do we intend to send messages to email and/or Matrix?

Mails aren't currently on my todo list, but if/when that feature is
implemented I assume it will be subscribe-only or dependent on the
user. E.g. we may send the user who caused a build failure an email,
but not every single project member.

> If so, perhaps we
> use a separate Laniakea channel for Matrix so as not to flood the
> PureOS channel. I suppose we can use the pureos-changes mailing list
> for messages too? pureos-project seems like it might be better left to
> higher level topics.
> <snip>

When the feature existed for Tanglu back in the days, we had a
#tanglu-changes IRC channel where messages were just dumped as-is. I
imagine we could have that on Matrix as well.
Sending build failures and results of QA runs to the mailinglist may
be a lot of spam, I am not sure whether we should do that.
The mailinglist currently holds direct changes to the archive (package uploads).

> [...]
> >
> > ## What's next?
> > ### Create an integration test framework for Laniakea
> > We need better testing, or rather, any testing for some Laniakea
> > modules and larger pieces of the codebase. Since a large chunk of
> > Laniakea is interfacing with existing code or with its own modules,
> > we
> > need some way to do intergration testing properly.
>
> When you say integration testing, what do you mean? Do you mean how the
> various components of Laniakea fit together?

Exactly that, as well as how those modules interact with other
components such as dak, Britney, etc.
I do not believe much in mocking components, so I am currently looking
into how we could possibly test the whole thing and components working
together easily.
One such a test could be to automatically set up Britney, perform a
run on a sample package repository, save the result to a temporary
Postgres database, sort the data and assert the result.

> > ### More unit testing!
> > The Python code doesn't have many tests written yet, so this needs to
> > be added as well.
>
> I think a description of the test framework you use (TAP? PyTest), and
> then a TEMPLATE python script might be a great way to get folks to
> contribute. I know I would.

Having people write tests would be amazing, but probably also not the
most fun task to start with ^^
At the moment I am thinking of using PyTest and Hypothesis[1]
together, the latter of which I find very appealing from its approach.

[1]: https://hypothesis.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

> > ### Bring back software.po.n (webswview)
> > The web application just needs to be rewritten. This is a work in
> > progress at time.
>
> What is the framework for the web app? Is it Angular, Vue, or perhaps
> something from Python like flask?

It's plain boring Flask. I am not a web developer, and Flask is a
thing that makes a lot of sense to me.
Also, it can just directly use the ORM of Laniakea ;-)

> > ### Package for Debian
> > Laniakea should be available from withing Debian. This is a long-term
> > goal as it requires at least some stability of the database schemas
> > and more and better testing. Also, the JavaScript dependencies of the
> > web modules need to be sorted out properly.
> > Ultimately though, at some point you can just apt install Laniakea to
> > create your own Debian derivative.
>
> I think a lot of derivative would use this if you could just apt-get
> install laniakea. It ought to make their lives much, much easier. I
> know this would have helped Maemo when Nokia essentially abandoned it.

It's purpose is like a pluggable "Launchpad lite" - in theory you
could have all features it provides with other tools, but that
requires a lot more human work.
In the long run I fear that I have to make Laniakea absorb dak to be
as efficient as I want it to be, but I will try to avoid that as much
as possible for now.
>From long discussions last Debconf, Laniakea is exactly what many
projects and derivatives need, but unfortunately it's not ready yet to
be used as easily as I want it to.

> > ## What can I do?
> > Contribute! Either by writing code for Laniakea (documentation is
> > currently updated to reflect the Python changes)
>
> URL? Are you using Readthedocs?

It's using MkDocs: https://lkorigin.github.io/ - the documentation
hasn't been updated for about a year though, and really needs a
complete overhaul.
The documentation also requires some practical examples to do basic
actions (e.g. scheduling builds with the CLI).

> >  or filing bugs.
>
> I filed a bug. You fixed it too quickly. :P

Neat :-D

Cheers,
    Matthias