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On Tuesday 18 October 2005 07:56, Raimondo Giammanco wrote: |
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> On Mon, 2005-10-17 at 20:16 +0100, Marcus D. Hanwell wrote: |
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> > I would like to announce our first scientific herd tester Lucas Chiesa |
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> > (tulku) <lucas.chiesa@×××××.com> - hopefully the first of many. Please |
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> > give him a warm welcome. |
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> > |
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> > I will be working with our new herd testers to improve the productivity |
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> > of the scientific herd - please let me know if you would be interested in |
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> > helping out, or have any suggestions. I will hopefully have more to |
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> > announce soon. |
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> > |
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> |
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> first of all welcome to Lucas, but could you Marcus point out where |
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> to find information on what an herd tester exactly does, or explain it |
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> yourself? How much time one is expected to invest, what are the |
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> prerequisites etc. etc. Sorry for the dumb question :) |
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> |
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Sorry - I should have been more verbose in my first post. I originally discussed the idea on this list some time ago - please see the post in the archives[1] for more details. Several people replied on and off list to say that they would be interested in taking part in such a program. |
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I am also a member of the amd64 porting team, where we have several architecture testers (ATs) who assist in necessary testing and bug fixing for amd64 porting activities. I thought that a similar approach may be helpful in the scientific herd as many of our applications tend to be quite complex and difficult to test for people outside of the intended field(s). |
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The amd64 team has a page[2] with details on ATs, and I plan to make a similar page for herd testers (HTs) in the future. So far we have just got one herd tester and several others interested. There is also a GLEP 41[3] awaiting approval on making ATs official Gentoo staff, and this will also be extended to herd testers. |
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All herd testers must pass the ebuild quiz in order to qualify. This involved reading the documentation already available and showing a reasonable understanding of Gentoo and ebuild writing. Once you have passed your bugzilla account is given extra permissions to edit bugs, allowing you to change their properties and assist the herd in managing bugs. |
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Herd testers are intended to assist developers with squashing bugs, testing new ebuilds and bringing them up to the standard required for inclusion. I also hope we will build up a wider skill set within the herd and increase the productivity of the team. A willingness to learn, and a few hours or so a week is all that is required. Being a herd tester also acts as a more gradual transition to being a full developer should you wish to take that route as has happened with numerous ATs in the amd64 team. |
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I am also in the process of setting up an experimental Gentoo science overlay, and HTs will hopefully have commit access to this. That way more ebuilds will make it into the overlay, and will be moved to portage once they are in a working state. More adventurous users can also easily test these highly experimental ebuilds should they wish to. Watch this space for more news :) |
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I seem to have written quite an essay now! Please let me know if there is anything else you would like to know. |
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Thanks, |
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Marcus |
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[1] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.science/295 |
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[2] http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/base/amd64/tests/index.xml?part=1&chap=1 |
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[3] http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/glep/glep-0041.html |
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-- |
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Gentoo Linux Developer |
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Scientific Applications | AMD64 | KDE | net-proxy |
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