Trying out template generation on dogfood/staging

Right now we have no good test platform for this: staging has no build farm, and dogfood has no codehosting. Expect this page to change a lot as we work and learn. We already have pages about doing this on a development system that may also help.

Internal Soyuz documentation on dealing with dogfood.

Approach

For now, we'll have to live with a split test setup:

• Push changes to generate jobs on staging.

• Copy the jobs over to the dogfood database.

• Let the dogfood build farm generate the templates.

Known Problems

intltool recognition

It looks like gettext has changed, and our check for intltool branches now also accepts some plain gettext branches. This happens with lp:gawk, which pottery mistakenly recognizes as intltool but doesn't process successfully because there is no GETTEXT_PACKAGE definition.

Checklist

Suitable branches

Make sure you have a branch that is pottery-compatible. (We call the code that generates templates from code "pottery"). For testing, it should normally not contain any .pot files. Otherwise we'd just end up importing those instead of ones we generated.

We don't yet know for sure what real-world branches will work right out of the box. We must fix that!

According to wgrant, on many branches, editing configure.ac to set GETTEXT_PACKAGE does the trick. See bug 568355.

You can easily check if a branch will work by generating a template locally. Run the following command from the LP tree in the packages root directory:

scripts/rosetta/pottery-generate-intltool.py

It outputs the template files it creates. It uses the same code as the build slave.

Candidate branches:

• lp:gedit: used to work with pottery (and no pots in the branch), but as of 2010-08-27 it doesn't seem to work.

• lp:gimp, but it's large.

• lp:ubuntu/gawk does not use intltool, but pottery seems to think that it does. See bug 568372.

• lp:libgnomeui: OK, one template

• lp:gconf: OK, one template, no pots in the branch.

Once you have a suitable branch, you can copy it to staging's codehosting using "bzr push -d lp:<branch> lp://staging/<branch> --use-existing-dir"

Builders

There must be at least one suitable 386 builder active. "Suitable" would be a virtualized builder for production runs, but here we set our jobs up for running on nonvirtualized ones so we can get at the logs. (It'll also make the tail of the log visible on the builder page).

Testing: Creating jobs

On staging we can test the generation of jobs, though we can't run them there.

Do all this on staging:

• Set up a productseries.
• Set up a pottery-compatible branch, e.g. by copying one off production.
• Set the branch as the productseries' development branch.
• Enable template imports for the productseries.
• Push a change to the branch.

Once your branch change is scanned, a triplet of matching records should appear in the staging database: a BranchJob, a Job, and a BuildQueue. They are matched on BranchJob.job, Job.id, and BuildQueue.job. In SQL it should be at the top of...

SELECT *
FROM BranchJob
JOIN Job ON Job.id = BranchJob.job
JOIN BuildQueue ON BuildQueue.job = Job.id
WHERE
    BranchJob.job_type = 6 AND
    BuildQueue.job_type = 4
ORDER BY Job.id DESC;

It probably has status set to 0 for "not started yet."

Testing: Running jobs

We can create job records directly in the dogfood database, which can't generate the jobs itself but which can dispatch them to its build farm.

Do all this on dogfood:

• Set up a productseries.

• Register a branch on dogfood, but do not push it (as dogfood has no codehosting).

• Set the branch as the productseries' development branch.
• Enable template imports for the productseries.

Now we directly create the job records (more or less as automatically created in the staging database) in the dogfood database, but using locally valid ids of course.

To do this, run:

/home/launchpad/bin/make-translation-templates-job <project name> <productseries name> <http branch url>

Here,

• project name is the identifying name of your product on dogfood.

• productseries name is the identifying name of your productseries in that product, e.g. "trunk"

• http branch url is the public URL, using the http protocol, of your real branch on production or staging. For example, http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~vcs-imports/gconf/trunk

This will create a job to be run on a nonvirtualized builder. If you want to change this, set the VIRTUALIZED variable to "true" (case-insensitive):

env VIRTUALIZED=TRUE /home/launchpad/bin/make-translation-templates-job <project name> <productseries name> <http branch url>

A lousy interface but it saved some time. Do not worry about what identity you're running under; the script automatically operates as launchpad.

Keep an eye on https://dogfood.launchpad.net/builders where it should appear shortly (and then, after processing, disappear again). Also, if everything works, templates should appear on your productseries' import queue!