DevConf.CZ 2023, Rawhide update test gating, ELN testing and more!

I'm in Brno, working from the office for a few days after the end of DevConf.CZ. It was a great conference, good to see people and feel some positive energy after all the stuff with RH layoffs and so on. It was really well attended, and there were a lot of useful talks. I presented on the current state of openQA and Fedora CI, with Miroslav Vadkerti kindly covering the Fedora CI stuff (thanks to Miro for that). The segmented talk video hasn't been updated yet, but you can watch it from the recorded live stream starting here (at 6:04:32). I think it went pretty well, I'm much happier with this latest version of the talk than the versions I did at DevConf.US and LinuxCon (sorry to anyone who saw those ones!)

The talk by Aoife Moloney and Michal Konecny on how the CPE team (which handles Fedora infra and apps) has started doing organized pre-scoping for projects instead of just diving in was really interesting and informative. The anaconda meetup wound up being just the anaconda team and myself and Sumantro from QA, but it was very useful as we were able to talk about the plans for moving forward with the new anaconda webUI and how we can contribute testing for that - look out for Test Weeks coming soon. Davide Cavalca's talk on Fedora ELN usage at Meta was great, and inspired me to work on stuff (more on that later).

There were a lot of random conversations as always - thanks to it being June, the "hallway track" mostly evolved into the "shadow track", under the shade of a big tree in the courtyard, with beanbags and ice cream! That's a definite improvement. The social event was in a great location - around an outdoor swimming pool (although we couldn't swim - apparently we couldn't serve drinks if swimming was allowed, so that seems like the best choice!) All in all, a great conference. I'm very much looking forward to Flock in Cork now, and will be doing my talk there again if it's accepted.

Tomorrow will be an exciting day, because (barring any unforeseen issues) we'll be turning on gating of Rawhide updates! I've been working towards this for some time now - improving the reliability of the tests, implementing test re-run support from Bodhi, implementing the critical path group stuff, and improving the Bodhi web UI display of test results and gating status - so I'm really looking forward to getting it done (and hoping it goes well). This should mean Rawhide's stability improves even more, and Kevin and I don't have to scramble quite so much to "shadow gate" Rawhide any more (by untagging builds that fail the tests).

Davide mentioned during his ELN talk that they ran into an issue that openQA would have caught if it ran on ELN, so I asked if that would be useful, and he said yes. So, yesterday I did it. This required changes to fedfind, the openQA tests, and the openQA scheduler - and then after that all worked out well and I deployed it, I realized it also needed changes to the result reporting code and a couple of other things too, which I had to do in rather a hurry! But it's all sorted out now, and we have new ELN composes automatically tested in production when they land. Initially only a couple of default-install-and-boot tests were running, I'm now working to extend the test set and the tested images.

Other than that I've been doing a lot of work on the usual things - keeping openQA updated and running smoothly, investigating and fixing test failures, improving stuff in Bodhi and Greenwave, and reviewing new tests written by lruzicka. I'll be on vacation for a week or so from Friday, which will be a nice way to decompress from DevConf, then back to work on a bunch of ideas that came out of it!