Re: Update schedule for binary packages?

["J. Lewis Muir" <jlmuir%imca-cat.org@localhost>]

On 08/08, Greg Troxel wrote:
> "J. Lewis Muir" <jlmuir%imca-cat.org@localhost> writes:
> 
> >>   current branch, supported OS version:
> >>     i386/amd64, reasonably frequent
> >
> > What does "reasonably frequent" mean?  I'm wishing for something more
> > concrete.
> 
> It means that there are a bunch of domU workers for each branch/os
> tuple, and they more or less update/build/publish in a loop, except that
> probably there isn't enough cpu/ram to run them all at once so sometimes
> any one might be paused.
> 
> And, I don't know what you are worried about.  Once a build is done,
> then yes there are pullups for security, but there aren't a lot of
> them.

I'm just asking.  In the past it seemed like security vulnerabilities
were not addressed on the stable branch due to a lack of resources.
What I'm worried about is a situation similar to that where the packages
are built once and never again, or a situation where they're built too
infrequently, say once a month, and this is not made clear.  I'm just
trying to evaluate whether the NetBSD CDN binary packages will work for
me or I need to build my own.
 
> Really - that's how it is.
> 
> If you want things done in a 24h kind of turnaround, then your options
> are probably do it yourself or find somebody to pay to do it for you.
> Or perhaps donate some build infrastructure to NetBSD (which means a big
> computer, remotely manageable, and the costs to host it in an adequately
> safe machine room, plus of course there's  the volunteer labor to manage
> it).
 
Again, I'm just asking.  I'm not saying the packages are updated too
slowly; I'm just asking what the update schedule is.

> I think the situation for 8/i386 nad 8/amd64 on the latest stable branch
> is pretty good.
> 
> > Or I'm wishing for a way to determine that for myself.  For example,
> > if there were a web page that listed the status of bulk builds and a
> > history of the output/report from those, I could have a look at that
> > and presumably see when the last run was, how frequently they run, how
> > long they take to run, etc.
> >
> > I looked at
> >
> >   https://mail-index.netbsd.org/pkgsrc-bulk/
> >
> > but that's a really poor UI for finding the information I'm looking for.
> 
> I summarized it for you :-)  But the basic problem is that the reality is
> fuzzier than you would like...
> 
> >> There is no schedule, really.  There are just processes that lead to
> >> i386/amd64 getting updated,

OK, if it's really not known, that's fine.  But it seems to me that it
wouldn't be too hard to give some kind of conservative upper bound on
the frequency, and that could be stated as the update schedule.  I still
think it would be nice to have a statement somewhere saying that the
packages are updated every few days or whatever it happens to be.  But
anyway, it's a suggestion, and if no one else likes the idea, then I
accept that.

> > It would be nice if there were a schedule.  Even something like the
> > following would be helpful: "A bulk build is scheduled to run once a
> > day, but sometimes it takes up to two days to complete, in which case it
> > will start a day after it last completed."
> 
> As I understand it, statements like that are just not true.  The
> update/build/post cycle runs as there are resources.  And perhaps
> doesn't run again even if there are resources, if the tree has not
> changed.

It was just an example statement of what would be helpful to me.  The
point was that I had no idea how frequently they were updated and would
find that information to be quite useful.

> The last commit on the stable branch is
> 
>   From: "Benny Siegert" <bsiegert%netbsd.org@localhost>
>   Subject: CVS commit: [pkgsrc-2019Q2] pkgsrc/audio/fasttracker2
>   To: pkgsrc-changes%NetBSD.org@localhost
>   Date: Tue, 23 Jul 2019 13:05:46 +0000 (2 weeks, 2 days, 10 hours ago)
>   Reply-To: bsiegert%netbsd.org@localhost
> 
> (and thank you bsiegert for doing this work!) and there are builds for
> all 4 release/arch combos I'm talking about within 3 days.  So things
> really seem pretty good.

That's great!  I totally agree!  I was only suggesting it would be
helpful to give a short statement about the update schedule for the
binary packages in each os_ver-architecture-pkgsrc_tag combination.  But
again, if no one else thinks this would be useful, then I accept that.

> >> and the bulk build reports are on the pkgsrc-bulk list.
> >
> > This is a really poor UI for finding what I'm interested in.  Most of
> > the messages are from Joyent Packages Development; nothing against them
> > at all, but if I'm looking for a report that corresponds to a particular
> > set of binary packages on the NetBSD CDN, it's quite difficult to
> > find.
> 
> I use gnus to look over the messages that I've stored in an IMAP folder
> and find that I can answer these questions pretty easily.
> For 8.0/x86_64, I see reports:
> 
> E  [ 434: Manuel Bouyer          ] pkgsrc-2019Q2 NetBSD 8.0/x86_64 2019-06-30 20:05
> E  [ 428: Manuel Bouyer          ] pkgsrc-2019Q2 NetBSD 8.0/x86_64 2019-07-22 22:41
> E  [ 446: Manuel Bouyer          ] pkgsrc-2019Q2 NetBSD 8.0/x86_64 2019-07-25 14:09
> 
> for 8.0/i386 I see
> 
> EF [ 577: Manuel Bouyer          ] pkgsrc-2019Q2 NetBSD 8.0/i386 2019-06-30 20:03
> E  [ 585: Manuel Bouyer          ] pkgsrc-2019Q2 NetBSD 8.0/i386 2019-07-15 19:10
> E  [ 590: Manuel Bouyer          ] pkgsrc-2019Q2 NetBSD 8.0/i386 2019-07-18 08:41
> E  [ 590: Manuel Bouyer          ] pkgsrc-2019Q2 NetBSD 8.0/i386 2019-07-20 03:12
> E  [ 595: Manuel Bouyer          ] pkgsrc-2019Q2 NetBSD 8.0/i386 2019-07-22 07:44
> E  [ 593: Manuel Bouyer          ] pkgsrc-2019Q2 NetBSD 8.0/i386 2019-07-24 04:28
> E  [ 593: Manuel Bouyer          ] pkgsrc-2019Q2 NetBSD 8.0/i386 2019-07-26 19:53
> 
> NetBSD 7.1 amd64 and i386:
> 
> E  [ 453: Manuel Bouyer          ] pkgsrc-2019Q2 NetBSD 7.1/x86_64 2019-06-30 20:36
> E  [ 448: Manuel Bouyer          ] pkgsrc-2019Q2 NetBSD 7.1/x86_64 2019-07-17 10:24
> E  [ 453: Manuel Bouyer          ] pkgsrc-2019Q2 NetBSD 7.1/x86_64 2019-07-18 14:28
> E  [ 442: Manuel Bouyer          ] pkgsrc-2019Q2 NetBSD 7.1/x86_64 2019-07-23 13:20
> 
> E  [ 506: Manuel Bouyer          ] pkgsrc-2019Q2 NetBSD 7.1/i386 2019-06-30 20:35
> E  [ 503: Manuel Bouyer          ] pkgsrc-2019Q2 NetBSD 7.1/i386 2019-07-12 18:28
> E  [ 501: Manuel Bouyer          ] pkgsrc-2019Q2 NetBSD 7.1/i386 2019-07-14 15:53
> E  [ 505: Manuel Bouyer          ] pkgsrc-2019Q2 NetBSD 7.1/i386 2019-07-18 14:00
> E  [ 489: Manuel Bouyer          ] pkgsrc-2019Q2 NetBSD 7.1/i386 2019-07-23 14:13
> 
> which basically tells you that those four are pretty up to date.
> 
> There are some "bulktracker" pages, like
> https://bulktracker.appspot.com/ but I don't think they show what you want.
> 
> Agreed this could be better.

I think a big help in making it clear that those emails are official
would be for them to have a From header field with a name and
appropriate email address that is official.  For example (just making
these up), one of the following:

* NetBSD Package Builder
* pkgsrc Package Builder
* pkgsrc Release Engineering Team
* pkgsrc Binary Packages Team

> I suspect that people have priorities like having more builds and fixing
> packages, vs posting stats about build frequency.

I get that, but I only got onto looking at build reports as another way
to figure out what the update schedule was in the absence of a statement
in the readme.  And until your clarification here, I didn't know that,
e.g., the messages from Manuel Bouyer were build reports for official
NetBSD CDN binary packages.
 
Thanks!

Lewis