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

[Anil Madhavapeddy]

Yes, this is excellent!  I'm not entirely sure how to interpret the data
as a package maintainer yet, but this much testing cannot be a bad thing :-)

Is the data available as a JSON or other structured feed?  It would make it
easier to consume rather than clicking through the web page.  Just curious
in case that already exists, and if not I can add it.

thanks
Anil

> On 7 May 2015, at 08:13, Markus Mottl <markus.mottl at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 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
>> _______________________________________________
>> opam-devel mailing list
>> opam-devel at lists.ocaml.org
>> http://lists.ocaml.org/listinfo/opam-devel
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Markus Mottl        http://www.ocaml.info        markus.mottl at gmail.com
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