[opam-devel] ANNOUNCE: OWS, the Opam Wheather Service

[Markus Mottl]

Hi,

awesome, that's a very helpful service, thanks for your work!

Here are two features that would be great to have: email notifications
if a maintainer has failing packages.  A search function that searches
the list of package maintainers so that people can get a quick
overview of all packages they maintain.

Best regards,
Markus

On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 10:38 AM, Roberto Di Cosmo <roberto at dicosmo.org> wrote:
> Dear fellow Opam developers,
>
>      We are proud to announce the first public release of a new and fully
> refactored version of OWS, the Opam Weather Service, and we are now reaching out
> to everybody on opam-devel for feedback and contribution to its evolution.
>
> If you are in hurry, the short message is:
>
>   - explore the dashboard available online at http://ows.irill.org/ !
>
>     The packages listed there are arranged by package name and sorted according
>     to the number of issues found on all available versions, you can click on a
>     package to get details of these issues, and zone-in on specific packages
>     using the search box.
>
>     On http://ows.irill.org/latest/today/summary.html you will find the list of
>     the causes of package installability problems, sorted by their impact:
>     packages causing the largest number of problems come first, to help focus
>     developer energy when improving the quality of the Opam repository
>
>   - use this information to look after the packages you are responsible for:
>     hints on how to fix dependency issues are displayed for each package
>
>   - if you want new features, make suggestions or report a bug, look at the
>     source code, available under AGPL from https://github.com/OCamlPro/ows
>     You are very welcome to contribute using github
>
> --
> Pietro Abate, Roberto Di Cosmo, Louis Gesbert and Fabrice Le Fessant
>
>
> Here are more details for who wants to know more.
> -------------------------------------------------
>
> OWS and distcheck
>
> Built on top of the distcheck tool from the dose library [1], OWS scans daily
> the packages in the Opam repository to spot all packages that cannot be
> installed at all because of dependency issues, and presents a dashboard that
> provides a bird's eye overview of the state of the repository.
>
> This static check is blazingly fast and does not require any physical
> installation: it catches *all* dependency issues, and it catches *only*
> dependency issues, so it does not replaces the other testing tools that are
> needed to catch compilation, configuration and installation issues encountered
> when actually deploying a package.
>
> A dashboard based on distcheck has been used in the Debian distribution for
> almost ten years [2], and we know well that it can be extremely beneficial to
> improve a package repository if it is properly integrated in a quality assurance
> process.
>
> A full paper describing how distcheck has been used is going to be presented at
> MSR 2015 in a week [3]; a preprint is already availabe [4].
>
> The new OWS
> --------------------
>
> An experimental prototype of OWS has been running for almost a year; the new
> version we unveil today is rebuilt from scratch in order to:
>
>  - clearly separate the presentation of the results in a dashboard from the
>    distcheck backend from dose: this required changes to opam, dose and
>    distcheck
>
>  - provide improved presentation of the results, in order to facilitate
>    the identification of the most problematic packages
>
>  - make available all relevant source code, properly released under an
>    Open Source licence, written by Pietro Abate (Inria/Irill)
>
> [1] http://dose.gforge.inria.fr/
> [2] http://qa.debian.org/dose
> [3] http://2015.msrconf.org/program.php
> [4] http://www.dicosmo.org/preprints/msr-2015-distcheck.pdf
> _______________________________________________
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> opam-devel at lists.ocaml.org
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-- 
Markus Mottl        http://www.ocaml.info        markus.mottl at gmail.com