Summary of rdopkg development in 2017

During the year of 2017, 10 contributors managed to merge
146 commits into rdopkg.

3771 lines of code were added and 1975 lines deleted
across 107 files.

54 unit tests were added on top of existing 32 tests – an increase
of 169 % to total of 86 unit tests.

33 scenarios for 5 core rdopkg features were added in new feature
tests spanning total of 228 test steps.

3 minor releases increased version from 0.42 to 0.45.0.

Let’s talk about the most significant improvements.

Stabilisation

rdopkg started as a developers’ tool, basically a central repository to
accumulate RPM packaging automation in a reusable manner. Quickly adding new
features was easy, but making sure existing functionality works consistently
as code is added and changed proved to be much greater challenge.

As rdopkg started shifting from developers’ powertool to a module used in
other automation systems, unevitable breakages started to become a problem and
prompted me to adapt development accordingly. As a first step, I tried to practice
Test-Driven Development (TDD)
as opposed to writing tests after a breakage to prevent specific case. Unit
tests helped discover and prevent various bugs introduced by new code, but
testing complex behaviors was a frustrating experience where most of
development time was spent on writing units tests for cases they weren’t meant
to cover.

Sounds like using a wrong tool for the job, right? And so I opened a rather
urgent rdopkg RFE: test actions in a way that doesn’t
suck and
started researching what cool kids use to develop and test python software
without suffering.

Behavior-Driven Development

It would seem that cucumber started quite a revolution of
Behavior-Driven Development (BDD)
and I really like
Gherkin,
the Business Readable, Domain Specific Language that lets you describe
software’s behaviour without detailing how that behaviour is implemented.
Gherkin serves two purposes — documentation and automated tests.

After some more research on python BDD tools, I liked
behave’s implementation, documentation
and community the most so I integrated it into rdopkg and started using
feature tests. They make it easy to describe and define expected behavior before
writing code. New features now start with feature scenario which can be
reviewed before writing any code. Covering existing behavior with
feature tests helps ensuring they are both preserved and well
defined/explained/documented. Big thanks goes to Jon Schlueter who
contributed huge number of initial feature tests for core rdopkg features.

Here is an example of rdopkg fix scenario:

Scenario: rdopkg fix
Given a distgit
When I run rdopkg fix
When I add description to .spec changelog
When I run rdopkg –continue
Then spec file contains new changelog entry with 1 lines
Then new commit was created
Then rdopkg state file is not present
Then last commit message is:
“””
foo-bar-1.2.3-3

Changelog:
– Description of a change
“””

Proper CI/gating

Thanks to
Software Factory,
zuul and gerrit, every rdopkg change now needs to pass following
automatic gate tests before it can be merged:

unit tests (python 2, python 3, Fedora, EPEL, CentOS)
feature tests (python 2, python 3, Fedora, EPEL, CentOS)
integration tests
code style check

In other words, master is now significantly harder to break!

Tests are managed as individual tox targets for convenience.

Paying back the Technical Debt

I tried to write rdopkg code with reusability and future extension in mind,
yet in one point of development with big influx of new
features/modifications, rdopkg approached critical mass of technical debt
where it got into spiral of new functionality breaking existing functionality
and with each fix two new bugs surfaced. This kept happening so I stopped
adding new stuff and focused on ensuring rdopkg keeps doing what people use
it for before extending(breaking) it further. This required quite a few core
code refactors, proper integration of features that were hacked in on the
clock, as well as leveraging new tools like
software factory CI pipeline,
and behave described above. But I think it was a success and rdopkg paid
its technical debt in 2017 and is ready to face whatever community throws at
it in near and far future.

Integration

Join Software Factory project

rdopkg became a part of Software Factory project
and found a
new home
alongside
DLRN.

Software Factory is an open source, software development forge with an
emphasis on collaboration and ensuring code quality through Continuous
Integration (CI). It is inspired by OpenStack’s development workflow that has
proven to be reliable for fast-changing, interdependent projects driven by
large communities. Read more in
Introducing Software Factory.

Specifically, rdopkg leverages following Software Factory features:

git
repository mangement
code reviews:
gerrit
Continuous Integration:
zuulV3 (bye Jenkins)
code metricts:
repoXplorer

rdopkg repo is still mirrored to github
and bugs are kept in Issues
tracker there as
well because github is accessible public open space.

Did I meantion you can login to Software Factory using github account?

Finally, big thanks to Javier Peña, who paved the way towards Software Factory
with DLRN.

Continuous Integration

rdopkg has been using human
code reviews
for quite some time, and it proved very useful even though I often +2/+1 my
own reviews due to lack of reviewers. However, people unevitably make
mistakes. There are decent unit and feature tests now
to detect mistakes, so we fight human error with computing power and
automation.

Each review and thus each code change to rdopkg is gated – all unit tests,
feature tests, integration tests and code style checks need to pass before
human reviewers consider accepting the change.

Instead of setting up machines and testing environments and installing
requirements and waiting for tests to pass, this boring process is now
automated on supported distributions and humans can focus on the changes
themselves.

Integration with Fedora, EPEL and CentOS

rdopkg is now finally available directly from Fedora/EPEL repositories, so
install instructions on Fedora 25+ systems boiled down to:

dnf install rdopkg

On CentOS 7+, EPEL is needed:

yum install epel-release
yum install rdopkg

Fun fact: to update Fedora rdopkg package, I use rdopkg:

fedpkg clone rdopkg
cd rdopkg
rdopkg new-version -bN
fedpkg mockbuild
# testing
fedpkg push
fedpkg build
fedpkg update

So rdopkg is officially packaging itself while also being packaged by
itself.

Please nuke jruzicka/rdopkg copr if you were using it previously, it is now
obsolete.

Documentation

rdopkg documentation was cleand up, proof-read, extended with more details
and updated with latest information and links.

Feature scenarios are now available as man pages thanks to mhu.

Packaging and Distribution

Python 3 compatibility

By popular demand, rdopkg now supports Python 3. There are Python 3 unit
tests and python3-rdopkg RPM package.

Adopt pbr for Versioning

Most of initial patches rdopkg was handling in the very beginning were
related to distutils and pbr, the OpenStack packaging meta-library,
specifically making it work on a distribution with integrated package
management and old conservative packages.

Amusingly, pbr was integrated into rdopkg (well, it actually does solve
some problems aside from creating new ones) and in order to release the new
rdopkg version with pbr on CentOS/EPEL 7, I had to disable hardcoded
pbr>=2.1.0 checks on update of python-pymod2pkg because older version of
pbr is available from EPEL 7. I removed the check (in two different places)
as I did so many times before and it works fine.

As a tribute to all the fun I had with pbr and distutils, here is a link
to my first
nuke bogus requirements patch
of 2018.

Aside from being consistent with OpenStack related projects, rdopkg adopted
strict sematic versioning that pbr uses, which means that releases are
always going to have 3 version numbers from now on:

0.45 -> 0.45.0
1.0 -> 1.0.0

And More!

Aside from the big changes mentioned above, large amount of new feature
tests and numerous not-so-exciting fixes, here is a list of changes might be
worth mentioning:

unify rdopkg patch and rdopkg update-patches and use alias
rdopkg pkgenv shows more information and better color coding for easy
telling of a distgit state and branches setup
preserve Change-Id when amending a commit
allow fully unattended runs of core actions.
commit messages created by all rdopkg actions are now clearer, more
consistent and can be overriden using -H/–commit-header-file.
better error messages on missing patches in all actions
git config can be used to override patches remote, pranch, user name and
email
improved handling of patches_base and patches_ignore including tests
improved handling of %changelog
improved new/old patcehs detection
improved packaging as suggested in Fedora review
improved naming in git and specfile modules
properly handle state files
linting cleanup and better code style checks
python 3 support
improve unicode support
handle VX.Y.Z tags
split bloated utils.cmd into utils.git module
merge legacy rdopkg.utils.exception so there is only single module for
exceptions now
refactor unreasonable default atomic=False affecting action definitions
remove legacy rdopkg coprbuild action

Thank you, rdopkg community!
Quelle: RDO

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