Re: [PATCH 0/2] gitlab: expose installed package info in build logs

[Daniel P . Berrangé]

On Thu, Jul 25, 2024 at 12:42:18PM +0300, Manos Pitsidianakis wrote:
> Hello Daniel,
> 
> On Wed, 24 Jul 2024 12:55, "Daniel P. Berrangé" <berrange@redhat.com> wrote:
> > Many times we see a build job start failing, we wonder if the installed
> > packages have changed since the last passing build. We can rarely
> > diagnose this, however, since we only have the new container image, not
> > the old one.
> > 
> 
> APT allows you to specify to pin package versions when installing; wouldn't
> that help ensure our tests are deterministic?

We want to be testing against latest packages because that reflects
what our users are likely to see on their own systems. IOW, having
failures after newly updated packages is a good thing - provided we
can easily identify what caused the breakage, to enable us to fix
it promptly - by promptly I mean same-day.

> Furthermore, a gitlab cron job pipeline can be set up to run every e.g. few
> months and inform of any updates so that we can manually bump them.

Only seeing breakage from new packages as long as a few months after it
happens is a bad thing. We benefit from fast detection and fast fixing.
In cases where the new package is broken, rather than QEMU, it is also
better to be able to report that back to the distro within days of them
rolling out the problem as it'll be fresh in their minds to fix.

With regards,
Daniel
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