danigm.net - rpmlint

rpmlint: Google Summer of Code 2024

danigm — Thu, 30 May 2024 00:00:00 +0200

I'm glad to say that I'll participate again in the GSoC, as mentor. This year we will continue the work done during the past year, as part of the openSUSE project.

So this summer I'll be mentoring an intern and we'll continue working on improving the testing framework of the rpmlint project.

This year we've a better testing framework, thanks to the work done during the past Summer of Code, by Afrid. So the goal for this year is to try to modernize existing tests and remove as much files as possible from test/binary directory, replacing those with mock packages defined with python code.

The selected intern is Luz Marina Montilla Marín. She has done some initial work in the rpmlint project, creating the mock packages for some tests and we've just started with the work to do during the GSoC program, evaluating the tests that we've right now and planning were to start.

She studies at Córdoba, Spain, my hometown. Every year I try to reach young people at different local universities, here in Andalucía, and sometimes I'm able to convince some students to participate, like the GSoC 2020, when Alejandro Dominguez, from Seville, were working on Fractal. So I'm happy that I'm increasing the number of free software developers in my local community :D

I'm sure that she will be able to achieve great things during these three months, so I'm looking forward to start to code and see how far can we go.

rpmlint updates (August 2023)

danigm — Wed, 30 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0200

We are at the end of the summer and this means that this year Google Summer of code is ending.

The recent changes applied now in the main branch include:

Remove usage of pkg_resource because it's deprecated.
Fix elf binary check with ELF files with a prefix.
New check for python packages with multiple .pyc files for different python versions.
Improve the testing framework (merged the work done during the GSoC 2023)

Summer of Code 2023 updates

The summer of code is ending and the work done by Afrid was good enough to be merged, so I merged it the past week.

I'm really happy with the work done during the GSoC program, now we've a more simple way to define tests for rpmlint checks mocking the rpm, so it's not always needed to build a fake rpm binary for each new test. This will make a lot easier to create simple tests, so I hope that we can increase the code coverage using this new framework.

During this time Afrid has extended the FakePkg class, so it's possible now to define fake metadata and files with fake tags and attributes. It's not complete and it's not a simple task to replace all the rpm binaries used for tests, because the Pkg class and RPM tags is a complex thing, but the current state allow us to replace a lot of them. Afrid has replaced some of the tests that uses binaries, but in the following months we can continue working on this and replace more.

After this work, we can now start to use more the FakePkg class in tests, so another task that we can do is to provide some common fake pkgs to use in different tests and new checks, so now it's possible to create fake packages with dynamic random data, so we can extend tests with fuzz testing and maybe this will help to improve the tool reliability.

Conclusion

I've participated as mentor several times now in the summer of code, and outreachy, and almost always was a good experience. With the gnome foundation in previous programs and this year with opensuse. These two communities are very open to collaboration and makes the whole process really simple, for me as mentor, and also for the intern.

I want to congratulate Afrid, because it was nice to work with him during this summer, he has done a great work, not just technically, but communicating, asking and finding his own solutions without requiring a continuous guidance.

He is very passionate and looks like a nice person, so I hope that he will continue around the open source, it could be opensuse, rpmlint or any other community, but this kind of people is what you want to find in any community.

After many years collaborating with different free software communities, it's amazing that there are so many great people in every project, of course you can find toxic communities and people, but in my experience, that's usually just noise, there are a lot of nice people out there, doing a great work, and I'm happy that young people like Afrid can be part of the free software movement, because this is what makes the free software great, the people that is working on it.

So Thanks a lot to Google for another summer of code, thanks to SUSE for letting me, and encourage me, to mentor, and thanks to all the free software developers that are out there.

I encourage everyone to participate in this kind of programs, for interns, it's a good opportunity to learn and to make some money working on free software, for mentors it's an opportunity to get some help in your project and help newcomers to be part of the community.

Have a lot of fun!

rpmlint updates (July 2023)

danigm — Thu, 06 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0200

I'm spending some time every week working in the rpmlint project. The tool is very stable and the functionality is well defined, implemented and tested, so there's no crazy development or a lot of new functionalities, but as in all the software, there are always bugs to solve and things to improve.

The recent changes applied now in the main branch include:

Update the usage of rpm to not use old API.
Fixes for rpmdiff -v, check for NULL char, special macros in comments and spell checking of description in different languages.
Move all the metadata from setup.py to pyproject.toml.
Releasing rpmlint as pre-commit hook
Improvements to the PythonCheck in the dependency checking.

Summer of Code 2023 updates

The first month of the Summer of Code has passed and Afrid is doing a great job there. We've now a draft Pull Request with some initial changes that allow us to mock rpm packages in tests so it's easier to create new tests without the need of creating a binary package.

The first step done was to extend the existing FakePkg class to allow us to define package files and some package metadata.

Now he's working in replacing all of the test_python.py tests that uses binaries rpm to something that doesn't needed.

The idea is to replace as much tests as possible to reduce the number of rpm binaries and after that, provide helper functions, decorators and classes to make it easy to write tests, writing less code.

Roadmap

In any software project there's always room for improvements, fixes and enhancements. If the project is there for enough time, it's even more critical to modernize the code to reduce the technical debt.

My plan for 2023 is to improve the tests around rpmlint as much as possible. First with the GSoC project, making it easier to write more tests, improving the testing tools that we've. And after the summer, improving the test coverage.

There's also a tool that shares some of the ideas with rpmlint, spec-cleaner, it's also written in Python, so the next step, after the tests improvements will be to take a deep look into the code of these two tools and try to integrate in some way. Maybe it's possible to refactor the common code into an external module, maybe we can bring some ideas from spec-cleaner to rpmlint. Not sure yet, but that'll be my next step.

Don't forget that this is free software, so you can participate too! If you find any issue in rpmlint or have an idea to improve it, don't hesitate and create a new issue.

rpmlint: Google Summer of Code 2023

danigm — Tue, 16 May 2023 00:00:00 +0200

I'm glad to say that I'll participate again in the GSoC, as mentor. This year will be a bit different from the previous ones, because I'm not mentoring a GNOME project but a openSUSE project.

I started to work at SUSE the past year and with this new job I get involved in the openSUSE community and I started to contribute to rpmlint.

So this summer I'll be mentoring an intern and we'll work on improving the testing framework of the rpmlint project.

The rpmlint project is a command line tool to check rpm packages, the correctness of these kind of packages and warn the packagers about usual problems or good practices. It's widely used in all Linux distributions based on rpm, mainly SUSE and RedHat.

It is written in Python and uses pytest for testing the code. Right now there are a lot of .rpm binary packages, to check different functionality, but that way of testing makes a bit hard to write new tests and to maintain with changes. The idea of this GSoC project is to extend the testing framework of rpmlint to support an easy way of writting tests that doesn't require a real rpm, something that can mock what it's in the .rpm binary and try to replace some of the current binary tests with this new mock.

The selected intern is Afrid Hussain. He has done some initial work in the rpmlint project, solving some minor issues and we're now preparing the work to be done during the GSoC program. I'm sure that he will be able to achieve great things during these three months, so I'm looking forward to start to code and see how far can we go.