Bileto

Landing changes through Bileto

Hello lander! If you got here, you're probably looking for information about how to use Bileto (formerly known as the "CI Train") or what to do to get your project landed to Ubuntu. For general information, make your way to the Landing your change to Ubuntu section below. If you already know the basics and just want to know which of the tools and processes to use for your specific landing, the Which landing method to use? section should help you.

Enjoy.

IMPORTANT! With the sunset of the Ubuntu Touch project, the main use-case of Bileto as a MP-based workflow became much less common (and useful), and now its purpose shifted more towards a manual package-staging helper with ephemeral PPAs and autopkgtests runners. For more information about this particular use case, see the Manual upload section of the documentation.

Landing your change to Ubuntu

There are two options for landing packages. You can either land your changes into the archive through listing merge proposals that you want to release, or by uploading source packages directly to the ppa. The first approach is recommended in all cases where the source package's upstream branch is maintained by Canonical.

Whenever you want to request a release of your component to the archive:

  • If this is your first time running a landing, ask the trainguards in #ubuntu-ci-eng to give you the required permissions for operating Bileto.

  • If this is the first time this source package has ever been released with Bileto, refer to the Inline Packaging guide to meet the minimum packaging standards.

  • Open the tickets page.

  • Sign in with SSO, click Create New Request, and you'll be presented with a form to fill out.

    • Description of landing: write here an overview of what your landing is about - is it fixing bugs? Adding some features? Try being informative without being over-verbose.
    • Test plans to run: this mandatory field documents how you, the lander, intend to test the given component(s). Generally you would put a URL to a document describing steps to test that your component functions correctly, as this information will generally not change much from one ticket to the next. See #QA for more details.

    • Merge proposals to land: here you list all the links to the merge proposals you want to land in this landing. Please note, this must be a newline-separated list of MP links, not branch links. More on this later.

    • Manual Download URLs: This optional field contains click packages / device tarball updates that don't require a PPA for testing, but instead must be downloaded manually by the tester.
    • Landers: List of people who care about this landing. These names will be pinged on IRC when ticket status changes, so use IRC nicks if possible.
    • Source Package Names: You can leave this blank and the correct value will auto-fill based on the contents of the PPA.
    • Target distribution: select which distribution you want to land into. Currently only ubuntu is supported but if ubuntu-rtm ever makes a comeback you'd select that here.
    • Target series: Which ubuntu release you want to build for. If you are requesting a touch landing which is developed on one trunk (i.e. everything that lands in devel is to land in stable), please select yakkety+xenial+vivid.

    • QA signoff: Values "N/A", "Required", or "Ready" will be automatically set as appropriate for your landing. The rule is: any stable-phone targets like vivid or 'yakkety+xenial+vivid' landings by default require it. See #QA for more information.

  • Once the request is filled out and you've clicked 'Create New Request', you can assign a PPA by clicking 'Assign' from the menu at the bottom of your new ticket.
  • Once your PPA is assigned, the menu will show some new buttons. Use the 'Build' button to start building packages from your merge proposals.
    • If you have manual packages not built from merges, you need a trainguard or Ubuntu core-dev to upload those to your PPA.
  • After the packages finish building, it is now your responsibility to test the packages from the PPA on a real device. More information about this is in the #QA section. Remember: you are responsible not only to test that the fix works, but also to test that your change didn't break anything else. Use the Test Plan.

  • If your packages pass your testing criteria, mark the ticket as tested:
    • Get all your MP's top-approved. From Bileto's perspective, you are free to approve your own merges, however in some teams this is frowned upon, so you must get your branches reviewed by your teammates.
    • Set 'Lander Signoff' to 'Approved'.
  • Britney will now automatically inspect your PPA and perform various installability checks and autopkgtests. Once britney approves your ticket, it will automatically be marked ready for QA, if appropriate.
  • If your ticket says "QA Signoff: Ready" you must wait for a QA person to approve your ticket.
  • Once your ticket has been approved by both Britney and QA (or if QA is N/A), you can publish your own ticket. Landers are permitted to publish their own PPAs so long as there are no packaging changes, and no manual sources in the PPA. In the event that you do have either packaging changes or manual sources, it is your responsibility to find a core dev to publish the PPA for you.

This is the standard process. When you prepare a list of MPs to land, the infrastructure will merge all of them together and build a source package using dpkg-buildpackage. This source package is then uploaded to the PPA that has been assigned to your ticket. The debian/changelog is automatically generated for you using the Commit Message field of each MP. Every ticket creates a new version in the changelog with one entry per merge. The version number is also auto-generated every time. After all changes land into the archive, these merges are automatically merged into trunk.

So, the general steps in the landing process from the lander's perspective are:

  1. Fill in a landing request
  2. Assign it yourself
  3. Build packages in PPA
  4. Test packages from the PPA on real hardware
  5. Mark ticket as Lander Signoff: Approved
  6. Wait for Britney to mark the ticket Approved.
  7. (in some cases) Wait for QA to mark the ticket Approved
  8. Publish the ticket yourself
  9. (in some cases) Find a core dev to ACK packaging changes and publish the ticket for you

Manual Source Uploads

Sometimes not everything can be dealt with using merge requests. Some packages (usually those Canonical is not upstream for) don't have their development happening on LP but they might be needed to be released through Bileto: either because of the QA sign-off requirement for touch, or simply because they're needed by a ticket, mixed-in with normal MP-based packages.

  1. Create a new ticket. In this case most fields are optional and do not have to be filled up
  2. Press 'Build' on the empty ticket - this creates the PPA assigned to the ticket
  3. Prepare the source packages locally
  4. Get the package uploaded to the PPA:
    • If you're a core-dev: simply use dput to upload the package to the PPA
    • In other cases, send the source package to a core-dev or trainguard with a request to upload to the PPA for you (one option is to dput to your personal PPA and then core-dev or trainguard can copy the package from there).
  5. Proceed normally with building & testing

Manual Source Uploads for the Security Pocket

Sometimes performing an upload that is meant to go to the respective -security pocket is required. Bileto PPAs try to be as close to the archive as possible, so that one can freely bin-copy packages directly to the Ubuntu archive. By default, Bileto PPAs are configured to build with -proposed enabled (like any packages built in the Proposed pocket), but the settings of package dependencies can be manually adjusted per-PPA (Bileto will not touch these settings on its own):

  1. Create a ticket for manual uploads, as usual
    • Be sure to select the 'Target Series' to something that's not the overlay PPA
  2. Once the PPA is created, go to the PPA's main view and then to the 'Edit PPA dependencies' settings
  3. Switch the Ubuntu dependencies to 'Security' and make sure no other PPA dependencies are present
  4. Press Save and proceed normally with building & testing

Landing your change to the Stable Overlay PPA

The stable overlay PPA is the place where all the stable development is happening for Ubuntu Touch. The rationale for it is that this time, learning by experience, we want to base our stable branch out off a released series - in this case: vivid.

How this works is: all current devel builds (and soon all stable builds) are built from vivid + the stable overlay PPA. This means we get all the goodness from vivid-updates and vivid-security, while we keep the dynamics of publishing touch packages for our purposes without having to go through the SRU process.

For a trio ticket such as yakkety+xenial+vivid, the destination field is ignored. The the first series never goes to the stable overlay PPA, and the others always do.

Trio landing for stable and devel

The current development series is yakkety. As per the current guidelines, all touch development will happen on the vivid overlay PPA. But to keep yakkety and xenial in sync, Bileto allows tickets to be built for all three together automatically.

NOTICE! Remember that all trio landings are required to go through the QA sign-off process because of their stable-overlay nature. This also means that if the stable-overlay gates are closed for a milestone, your ticket won't be released as a trio landing. What the trainguards can do for you is release the yakkety version and then request you to sync your work back to the vivid stable-overlay once the gates are open.

  1. Fill in a standard ticket
    • The merges need to point to your trunk (devel) branch, as the merges will be built against yakkety and then copied to xenial and vivid
  2. In the Target Series drop-down select "yakkety+xenial+vivid"
  3. Assign your own PPA
  4. Build the ticket
    • The build job will create 3 source packages - one for yakkety, one for xenial, and one for vivid - and upload them to the PPA
    • The primary target is always yakkety
    • Your merges will be built for yakkety (with the changelog entries generated for yakkety), but then the sources will be duplicated (with re-written versions) for xenial and vivid
  5. Test the generated packages on real hardware
    • Please test all three
  6. Set Lander Signoff: Approved
  7. Wait for Britney to approve the ticket
  8. Wait for QA to approve the ticket
  9. Publish it yourself once everything is approved.

Handling Symbols

Because of the gcc5 C++ ABI break, symbols file maintenance has become more difficult. The compiler generates differently-mangled names for the old and new C++ ABI, so it is not possible to use a single symbols file for both 4.9 and 5.x ABIs.

Rather than maintaining two symbols files, it is better to maintain a symbols file only for vivid and to use a shlibs file for xenial. Nothing is lost with this approach because the exact same code is compiled for both distros. Therefore, any difference in symbols files between 4.9 and 5.x is due only to changes in the compiler (name mangling and inlining). Or, to spell it out more clearly: a symbols file for xenial cannot detect any ABI breaks that won't also be detected by the symbols file for vivid.

A workable way to keep a single source tree for both vivid and xenial is to generate the symbols file for vivid, and to generate a shlibs file for xenial during the build. (Also see below--it is possible to ditch the symbols files altogether.) In addition, you need to generate all the other debian files, such as control, *.click-hook, and the various *.install files. The hook you need is called debian/bileto_pre_release_hook:

Bileto will invoke a shell script that generates the files depending on the series. It's the usual hackery with sed and the like, but it gets the job done quite effectively. This script runs after all your merges have been merged but before the 'Releasing ...' commit is committed, so any changes you make in this script will be included in the release commit.

The script reads the current version number from a VERSION file in the debian directory. The version file contains something like 1.0.1. (By definition, we are ABI compatible if the minor and major version number stay the same---your rules may be different.) The script then parses out the three version components and derives an soversion number from that. (Our CMakeLists.txt reads the version info from the same VERSION file so, when the version number changes, we change it once in that file and everything else for the build and the packaging adjusts automagically. (For example, we use this to correctly set the soname when we build a shared library, and substitute the soversion into the .pc file for pkgconfig.)

The script uses sed to modify the various debian files. For example, control is generated from control.in. The control.in file contains substitution markers that sed looks for. For example:

Package: libunity-scopes@UNITY_SCOPES_SOVERSION@

This then turns into libunity-scopes3 on vivid, and libunity-scopes1.0 on xenial and later.

Generating the other files uses similar tricks to get the correct xenial or vivid version and soname into the right spots.

For unity-scopes-api, we have ditched symbols files altogether and use abigail instead. While the symbols file check is better than nothing, it does not detect many ABI breaks, such as changing the return type of a function, re-ordering struct members, changing an enumeration, making a non-virtual method virtual (plus many, many others). abigail does a much better job at this and provides a far better assurance that the ABI is indeed still intact.

ABI compliance testing is implemented as normal unit test, so it runs every time we build. You can find the relevant scripts here. The test requires a baseline ABI dump for each architecture. One easy way to get at these files is to make a temporary ticket that generates the ABI dump and adds it to the binary package. Once the PPA is built, you can grab the binary package for each architecture, pull out the dump file, check that into the source tree for future use, and then throw the PPA away.

ABI compliance checking is fast enough to tolerate. (For unity-scopes-api, which is large, it adds about 6 minutes to our total build time in Jenkins on Arm.) For most packages, that time will be much less. The added safety and no need to maintain symbols files any longer are well worth the wait though. Note that, when you do decide to break ABI, you will need to re-generate the new baseline ABI dumps and add them to the source tree.

Removing Packages from your Ticket

  1. You must remove the MPs from the merges field, and remove the package name from the Source Package Names field.
  2. You must ask a trainguard or core-dev to remove the package from the PPA.

Bileto Operation

Abandon a ticket

If your ticket is a failure and you want to give up on it, you must Abandon it. Abandoning a ticket will delete all the packages in the associated PPA, delete all the diffs that have been uploaded to swift, and set the status to 'Abandoned', which closes the ticket.

If you change your mind about an abandonment, it is possible to build abandoned tickets. They will spring back to life with a new PPA created for them, however there is a delay between when a PPA gets deleted and when it's name is free to be re-used again so you may need to wait an hour between abandoning and building the same ticket. If you're in a hurry you can create a new ticket and copy the MPs over.

QA Sign-off Needed

Under certain circumstances your ticket may need to go through QA sign off. This is usually during situations when the quality level of the image has regressed severely or must be maintained at a high-level. Right now these are:

  • For all landings to the stable images (vivid + overlay PPA)

There is an exception to this rule if your landing contains an isolated bug fix. Right now there is not a strict definition of this term, but as guidance an isolated bug fix landing is:

  • Only one or a couple of bug fixes
  • A small change and not impacting a large number of sub-components of that package
  • A change in a package that does not have a lot of reverse dependencies, since this makes it much harder to assess the impact of the landing.

If QA sign-off is required then you will be expected to provide more detailed information about the testing you have done in the Test plans field of the ticket so that QA have a good basis on which to build their additional testing. Here are some tips:

  • Never just test that the bug(s) alone are fixed - remember the potential for regressions
  • Look at what is actually landing and make sure testing is done for all the updated packages. For example if the primary intent of the ticket is to fix music player controls, but the fix requires a media-hub update then you should probably run the whole media-hub test plan.
  • Take into consideration the dependencies and reverse dependencies involved - ask yourself, who could I break? Ideally your package's test plan should have some guidance on this (for example see the Dependents/Clients section media-hub's test plan

  • If you only provide a link to the test plan, then bear in mind that QA will assume you've run all the tests in that plan and they have passed. If tests then fail for a reason you haven't mentioned then it will cause confusion and delay the landing, so make sure to record all cases where you have not run a test or a test has failed (and why).

Lastly, if you don't use the bileto tool for installing the PPA then you need to mention what steps you used to install the PPA, since bileto is the assumed way.

Isolated bugfixes for stable - confirmation

Whenever a landing is targeting a stable branch and is marked by the lander as not requiring QA sign-off because of an isolated bugfix, the Landing Team tries to verify if this indeed falls into this category. The Landing Team either by themselves or with the help of the QA team look at the landing description, looking for any rationale for this exception. Merge requests or diffs are also examined in case that's needed.

The best practice is to directly ping the QA team with a question if your change can go through without a full QA sign-off. The QA Team is here to ensure that things landing into stable are as safe as possible.

Branching for a Stable Series

dch: fatal error at line 1080:
New version specified (0.2+15.04.20170331-0ubuntu1) is less than
the current version number (0.2+17.10.20160901.3-0ubuntu2)!  Use -b to force.

Are you completely flummoxed by this error message? You've come to the right place!

This error message happens when you attempt to build a release for a stable series, using the devel series trunk. Don't do that! Because:

  • If Bileto let you do this, the end result would be that your devel-series trunk no longer matches the package that is actually released in devel series.
  • The next time you attempt to do a devel-series release, this stable update will also be released to devel series, which probably isn't what you intended (if it is what you intended, you should be using a dual/trio ticket and release to all series at the same time, which avoids this issue).

There are two possible solutions:

  • Just use a dual/trio series ticket, this will upload your MP for both the devel series and the stable series, keeping the devel trunk consistent with the devel series.
  • If you're really, really sure that you really just want to release your MP for the stable series only, you must branch trunk for the stable series (will assume Vivid for this example):
    1. Find your package in the stable overlay PPA for vivid.
    2. Download the DSC file and extract the debian/changelog file from it.
    3. Look in the trunk commit history to find the commit that corresponds to the release in vivid. It can be the most recent one but isn't necessarily, eg, if there have been some devel-only releases. Then do:
         bzr branch lp:yourproject -r $REVNO vivid && bzr push -d vivid lp:~teamowner/yourproject/vivid
    4. Confirm that the most recent commit at lp:~teamowner/yourproject/vivid has the commit message "Releasing $VERSION" such that $VERSION corresponds to what's in the vivid overlay PPA.

    5. Take the debian/changelog you extracted earlier and copy it over the one on your new trunk, and commit that with a message such as "Branching trunk for Vivid." This is necessary because the version numbers don't actually match, so you should see a big diff where many historical releases of your project have their version numbers changed from, eg, 0.2+16.10... to 0.2+15.04...

    6. Now create a new MP proposing your original branch that caused this whole problem, and target it at this new trunk you've just created, and build that.

Once you've done all this, be careful not to do another dual/trio ticket, as that will clobber everything you've done here, releasing all your diverged devel releases back to the stable release.

Reverting a Landing

Did somebody discover a regression AFTER a ticket was fully QA'd, published, and merged? Never fear, the Revert button is here! Reverting a landing will re-upload the second-most-recent upload of a source package, with a new version number stamped on it, so the upload will be accepted over the newest one with the regression. Here's what to do:

  1. Start a new ticket. The original ticket with the MPs on it cannot be used for the revert.
  2. On the new ticket, manually type in the names of the source packages to the sources field.
  3. Make sure your series selection matches that of the original ticket. If the original landing was a trio ticket, the revert ticket should be a trio ticket so that it's reverted in all series equally for consistency. But if you had a vivid-only phone landing, be sure to make the revert a vivid-only ticket. Reverting in a trio ticket does not mean "reupload the second-most-recent of each series", it means "take the second-most-recent from yakkety and upload it to yakkety, xenial, and vivid". This is only what you want if the landing you're reverting was also a trio.
  4. Click the revert button. This behaves much like the Build button and will show you a log of the packages built.
  5. QA the ticket as per usual
  6. If QA confirms the regression is fixed, publish as usual!

In this process, nothing will be merged to the project trunk (hence no MPs), this allows upstream developers to work on fixing their trunks uninterrupted while the revert goes directly to users. While you technically can revert a revert, this is not recommended; instead the upstream landers should do a fresh landing with their fix for the regression.

Interpreting Ticket Statuses

Bileto monitors PPA statuses at a per-package level, which can lead to some detailed status messages. Fortunately, in many common cases, irrelevant details are omitted for clarity. Here are some examples:

  • Successfully built or Failed to build

    • When there is no package list, it means that all packages have this same status. Error states such as Failed to build or Dependency wait will appear if that status appears on any arch, but Successfully built will appear only if it succeeded on all arches.

  • Failed to build (xenial/foo-package). Successfully built (xenial/bar-package, xenial/grill-package).

    • When there are multiple sentences with series/packages in brackets, the message applies to the packages named in the brackets. So in this example foo-package failed to build in xenial while the other two succeeded.
  • Proposed pocket (yakkety/foo-package). Release pocket (vivid/foo-package, xenial/foo-package).

    • This means that the ticket has been published but has not yet made it all the way to Ubuntu archive yet. When publishing a trio ticket, the vivid and xenial packages are copied immediately to the overlay PPA, so it will indicate "Release pocket" (the fact that it's the release pocket of the overlay PPA and not the release pocket of the vivid archive is implied by the fact that it's a trio landing. trio landings never target vivid archive). Once the yakkety package finishes migrating through Proposed and into Release, the ticket will be auto-merged, meaning all your merges will be merged to trunk automatically.

  • Release pocket (vivid/foo-package, xenial/foo-package). Successfully built (yakkety/foo-package).

    • This means that the vivid and xenial packages have been published but the yakkety package has not been published, most likely due to a bug. "Successfully built" implies that the package is not in any upload queue or proposed pocket or anything, because if it was, the status would say so. Please notify trainguards immediately if you see this!
  • Needs rebuild due to new commits (yakkety/foo-package). Successfully built (vivid/foo-package, xenial/foo-package).

    • That's weird! Why doesn't the vivid/xenial ones reflect that it also needs to be rebuilt to match the yakkety one? Well the class that implements the secondary series does not have any knowledge of MPs or commits, so when unbuilt commits are discovered in the yakkety MPs, the vivid/xenial bits have no way to also check that. So this is the expected status when a trio ticket has new commits. Rest assured that when you rebuild the package, all series will be rebuilt, you cannot build one without the other so they can never get out of sync.

Common Status Messages

Ready to build

  • No package is in the PPA, mostly likely because the PPA is newly created, but also possibly because the packages have been deleted.

PPA/bzr version mismatch

  • The version number in the PPA does not match the version number in the bzr branch. Can also be PPA/git version mismatch if you are using git. A number of different situations can trigger this:

  • The upload to the PPA has failed. Launchpad batch-processes PPA uploads so even if the log indicates a successful upload, launchpad can still reject it asynchronously after the fact. Generally the conditions under which launchpad would reject an upload are predictable so if this happens it is almost always a bug in Bileto that made it generate a bad version number for the package that launchpad doesn't like (eg, if it's lower than the existing one in the PPA).
  • The upload to the PPA is just really slow. At times launchpad can be under heavy load and your package just might take a while to appear in the PPA.
  • The push to the bzr/git branch failed. This has never happened as far as I know, but if it did happen it would cause this error message.

In short, this is a little racy. If you see this message, wait 20 minutes. If it doesn't go away after 20 minutes then some investigation is required. Check that the PPA really contains your package. Generally this can be fixed by simply doing another build, but please do wait 20 minutes and investigate the issue instead of just blindly clicking rebuild every time you see this.

Bad merges

  • This happens if you have merges that are either Rejected or Superceded. Click the "Status" link to see the full log, which indicates which merges need attention.

Needs rebuild due to new commits

  • Bileto has detected new commits on either the source or target branches of your merges. Click the "Status" link to see the list of where new commits have been detected. Note that this message won't appear if the only new commits are Launchpad Translation auto-commits.

Needs rebuild due to burned version number

  • This happens when the same source package is built in two different tickets on the same day, such that they both have the same version number, and one of those tickets has been published. The other ticket sees that the destination archive has a matching version number, but the package has differing contents, so the current version number is now "burned" (eg, already used up). Usually this message will shortly be followed by the new commits message after the other ticket merges, so take this as an early warning that you'll soon need to rebuild (but not yet!).

Release/Updates/Proposed pocket

  • This ticket has been published and is on it's way to the archive! The ticket will automatically merge once all packages are found to be in either the Release or Updates pocket. It is safe to manually finalize when packages are in the Proposed pocket, however this is discouraged because you most likely want to do this when something is stuck in Proposed, and finalize is just ignoring the problem. Much better to fix the problem and let the package migrate normally.

NEW/UNAPPROVED queue

  • If your package has never been released in ubuntu before, it will find itself in the NEW queue, and if the archive is frozen (or you're doing an SRU), it will be in the UNAPPROVED queue. This is not something that will migrate on it's own and does require manual intervention to prod along, so be sure to ask for help if you see this state. WARNING: it is not safe to finalize the ticket in this state! If you merge, the packages will be lost and your release will never make it to the archive.

DONE queue

  • Apologies for this cryptic message, this happens when the package has been uploaded to the -proposed archive but the ticket destination is set to a PPA instead of the ubuntu archive. "DONE" means that the upload to the ubuntu archive was successful, but it doesn't give the expected "Release pocket" or "Proposed pocket" message because it's looking at the overlay PPA instead, and the package isn't there. This situation can be resolved by copying the package from your PPA into the overlay PPA.

Destination version is missing from changelog

When you see this message, click through to the bileto log and it will show you the diff between what is in the destination archive and what is on your project trunk. There are three scenarios that cause this message to appear:

  1. Your ticket was already published but you rebuilt the ticket since then. Bileto is "stateless" and so isn't able to recognize when a package in the destination archive is a previous build from the same ticket. If this is the case, you must join #ubuntu-release on freenode and ask an archive admin to delete the offending package from -proposed [as requested by slangasek]. Once the package is deleted this message will go away and you'll be able to submit the ticket for qa again.

  2. Some other ticket containing the same source package was published but hasn't yet merged to trunk. In this case no action is required yet, simply wait for the other ticket to merge to trunk, at which point your status will update to 'Needs rebuild due to new commits' and then you should rebuild your ticket.
  3. A manual upload has been uploaded to the destination archive, not using bileto. This can happen for a variety of reasons, typically an archive admin has uploaded a trivial fix for some packaging issue, but didn't use bileto to do it. In this case you must inspect the status log which will show you the exact diff that is missing from your trunk, you'll need to commit that to your trunk manually and then rebuild in order to continue. If you ignore this message in this case, it means that publishing your ticket will result in reverting the work of the archive admin. Don't do that!

The first two scenarios will be characterized by version numbers that end with -0ubuntu1 while scenario three will typically have some other version number, such as -0ubuntu2 or -0ubuntu1.1. Unfortunately there is no way to automatically distinguish between the first two scenarios, you'll need to Just Know whether you rebuilt an already-published ticket or not.

Failed to build

  • Your package was uploaded to the PPA but did not build successfully! Click the "Status" link to see the full list of what packages/arches failed and links to the failure logs.

Diff missing

  • Most likely you uploaded manual sources to your PPA, although this can appear on MP builds if there was an error generating diffs, which can happen from time to time. Please click the Diff button on your ticket to resolve this.

Successfully built

  • Absolutely no problems could be (automatically) found with your package build. Congrats! Test it out and publish it!

Notifications

IRC

All ticket status changes are pinged in #ubuntu-ci-eng on freenode. Messages will contain the contents of the "landers" field in the landing request, so make sure your IRC nick appears in the "landers" field of any requests that you care about.

Email

Important behavioural changes in Bileto are occasionally announced via the mailing list. Please join the team & subscribe to the mailing list so you stay up to date with important announcements.

Generated debian/changelog

By default, a debian/changelog entry will be automatically generated for you, based on the text you enter into the "Commit Message" field of the merge proposals in the ticket. For simple changes this is fine, however there are a number of limitations and you may find yourself disappointed with the generated changelog. If so, you are free to create your own debian/changelog entry, just make sure to use series UNRELEASED so that Bileto can still do it's auto-version-number generation magic. If you make your own debian/changelog and use a series other than UNRELEASED, your entry will be ignored and a new one will be created on top of it which is not what you want.

Command-Line Tool

Installing a PPA onto an Ubuntu Touch device is a bit of a chore because you have to set the device writable, pin the ticket PPA higher than the overlay PPA, etc. Fortunately there is a tool to automate this.

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:phablet-team/ubuntu/tools
$ sudo apt-get install phablet-tools-bileto
$ bileto help

How to Coordinate the Publishing of Multiple Large Landings

Sometimes, there will be a few large tickets wanting to publish around the same time, eg mir and unity8. When this happens, best practices is to do an image build in between publishings, because this makes it easier to bisect where regressions came from. It's a little bit tricky however, because certain tools report information differently and there's a race condition that you can fail if you're not careful. Best to follow these steps:

1. Publish one of the tickets.

2. Wait for it to migrate. Eventually, queuebot will ping that the request is Release pocket.

3. It's not yet safe to kick the image build, however. You must now use rmadison to confirm that the packages are truly out of the -proposed pocket and in the release pocket.

4. Once rmadison confirms publication has completed, now kick the image build.

5. Wait until the image build has completed, to ensure the build succeeds and doesn't need to be retried or fixed.

6. Now publish the second ticket.

Renaming a Source Package

Are you trying to rename a source package and getting weird errors? Don't do that!

Just kidding, but here's what's going on. Bileto inspects the *trunk* (merge target) in order to discover what source package name to use for building. It is therefore not possible to propose merges that change the source package name of your project. You'll need to push a direct trunk commit which changes the source package name, and then put other changes into an MP which can then build packages with the new name. You'll need to ensure the first line of your debian/changelog on trunk contains your desired source package name.

Bileto (last edited 2021-02-10 09:39:58 by sil2100)