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

[Manos Pitsidianakis]

On Thu, 25 Jul 2024 12:56, Thomas Huth <thuth@redhat.com> wrote:
> On 25/07/2024 11.42, 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?
>
> Even if tests would be more deterministic that way, I also don't think 
> that's what we want: We would test with backlevel packages that users are 
> not using (since they'll normally use the latest version of a package from a 
> certain version of a distro). So in our CI, we would not be able to 
> reproduce the issues that the users are seeing on their systems.

Definitely, but the current testing makes it harder to discern the lines 
between QEMU regression and QEMU not working with latest updates. If we 
had e.g. a pinned job and a "latest" job disagreeing we'd know the 
cause. Of course that means extra CI minutes, maintainer upkeep etc etc, 
I know, but this was my reasoning, I don't dismiss testing for what 
users experience. :)

Manos