Mancoosi Weblog

I've attended DebConf9 (well, I'm still attending, but it will be over in a few hours), the annual Debian developers conference. There, I've delivered a talk where I've presented a status update about the Mancoosi project. The talk has also addressed some new usages we are doing of EDOS tools (currently maintained by Mancoosi project members, hello Jaap) for Quality Assurance purposes.

As always happen at DebConf, people find out hacks interesting new ways of using "old" tools. Last year, starting from an idea from Ralf, we developed edos-builddebcheck; it consists of a wrapper around edos-buildcheck which is able to detect packages whose build dependencies are not satisfiable in a given distribution. That, per se, is already very useful because truly free software is achieved only when its users are able to rebuild it starting from sources. ... but edos-builddebcheck can be made even more useful, by integrating it into build daemons (those pieces of every distribution infrastructure which automatically re-compile binary packages on all architectures supported by the distribution). And that is precisely the idea put forward, and implemented, by Joachim Breitner here at DebConf.

Starting from today the Debian build daemon scheduler, called wanna-build, will verify build dependencies using edos-builddebcheck before attempting to build a package. If they are not satisfiable, the package will be put into a new waiting state instead of trying build it. Very cool!, ... and a huge time saving for buildd maintainers that thus far needed to recognize build failures of this kind among tons of other, more serious, build failures.

A Mancoosi related paper has been presented at the 21st International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI'09) which took place on July 11-17th in Pasadena, CA. In our paper we propose a new method for dealing with the optimal integration of new versions of software packages, dubbed Multilevel Boolean Optimization. More details can be obtained from reading the paper.