bits from the ci.debian.net operators

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Hi all, here are some bits from the ci.debian.net team.

Welcome autopkgtest 6.0
=======================

Autopkgtest now requires Python >= 3.11. While this change will not in
practice affect users of the tool as packaged in Debian (the package is
still easily backportable to oldstable), we took the occasion to bump
the package major version.

No more testbed reuse
=====================

When multiple tests are defined in the debian/tests/control file,
autopkgtest (<< 6.0) has some heuristics to try to reuse the same
testbed for multiple tests as an optimization, instead of providing
a fresh testbed for every test. With autopkgtest 6.0, we are moving away
from this: every test will be served a fresh testbed. This resolves
classes of bugs where the final test result depends on which tests are
executed, or on their order. It simplifies reasoning on test runs, and
better matches what users normally expect from a CI system.

This comes with a performance cost, especially for packages with
multiple, fast tests. Given the benefits, we deem this cost acceptable.
Package maintainers are encouraged to translate individual autopkgtests
that can share a testbed into test cases within a single autopkgtest,
possibly existing testing frameworks.

Work is in progress to optimize testbed provisioning using container or
virtual machine snapshots (for virt servers that support that, such as
Incus).

ci.debian.net moving to Incus
=============================

We are planning to move most package testing from plain lxc to Incus
containers. The later offers several advantages, including but not
limited to security, reliability and ease of use for package
maintainers. We will perform this change by first checking which
packages that pass with lxc fail with incus, and those will get bug
reports.

This transition from lxc to incus is a first step towards, in the medium
term, moving the Debian CI test running to Debusine, which already uses
Incus. More information into this move should be available in a future
communication from us.

Architecture support
====================

For about 3 quarters we didn't have running hardware to run tests on
armhf (and armel). Last month the host returned to operations, so we now
support all official architectures again for unstable, testing and
stable. We recently also increased the capacity for ppc64el and s390x.

While riscv64 is still relatively new, not all available hardware is
equally powerful. If your experience issues on some of our host, but not
on others, please let us know. We think it's smarter that we maintain
the list for failing tests due to specific host performance centrally.
We can drop that in one go once we have replaced the slower hardware,
instead of everybody needing to track that individually.

Support questions
=================

Please feel free to ask your questions about autopkgtest or its test
results on the #debci OFTC channel. If your prefer e-mail, you can use
[email protected]. Please be aware that we are not the same team as the
one that operates Salsa CI.

On behalf of the team,

Paride

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