software quality Archives - Rainer Gerhards

PRs should include one commit per feature or bugfix – but not more. Especially fix-up commits are really bad and we try to automatically reject them.

rsyslog CI rejects a PR with “bad” structure

A fix-up commit is one that fixes a previous commit within the same PR.The key point is that it does not correct a current coding bug, but one that would have been introduced in the same PR. The proper thing to do is melt it together with the commit that made the mistaken. It is best to not even create the fix-up commit in the first place. Use “git commit –amend” when applying the fix.

There is a hard technical reason why fix-up commits are bad: git bisect provides an easy way to find regressions. When there are commits that do not build (or where tests fail), git bisect does not work. Continue reading “Squash your Pull Requests!”

Today, we release rsyslog 8.31. This is probably one of the biggest releases in the past couple of years. While it also offers great new functionality, what really important about it is the focus on further improved software quality.

Let’s get a bit down on it. First let’s mention some important new features:

mmongodb has greatly been enhanced – among others, it now uses the current, state-of-the art client library and supports TLS and MongoDB replicasets… and more. Special thanks go to Jérémie Jourdin and Hugo Soszynski of Advens
omprog has been greatly improved and now provides full access to all of rsyslog’s action capabilities. A big thanks goes to Joan Sala.
the KSI signature subsystem has been upgraded and now operates faster than ever. Thanks to Allan Park for his work.
a seamingly small but important capability has been added to mmanon: it now supports embedded IPv4 adresses in IPv6. This is vital to achieve perfect privacy. Thanks to Jan Gerhards for adding this.
… and of course a couple of smaller additions (albeit not less important).

And then we have a set of several hundred commits concerned with improved software quality:

testbench dynamic tests have been extended
coverage of different compilers and compiler options has been enhanced
more modules are automatically scanned by static analysis
daily Coverity scans were added to the QA system, which have proofen to be a very useful addition
more aggressive and automated testing with threading debuggers (valgrind’s helgrind and clang thread sanitizer) has been added, also with great success
as a result of these actions, we could find and fix many small software defects.
and there also have been some big and important fixes, namely for imjournal, omelasticsearch, mmdblookup and the rsyslog core

Many users were involved in finding and fixing bugs, many of which all I do know from is there github handle. So rather than highlighting just some of them, I would like to refer to the github milestone issue tracker where all can be found. My sincere thanks to everyone for all their support!

I consider rsyslog release 8.31 a major step forward in our QA policy. We already had improved quite a bit and the state was already pretty good. However, with the changes introduced in 8.31, we make a big step forward, into a kind of next-gen QA policy. Of course, QA is a journey and not a “do once” target. So expect more good stuff upcoming in the next releases. We are not done yet!

I would like to use this opportunity to express a personal “thank yo” to Thomas Deutschmann, also know as Whissi for all his good advice and sometimes strong words that drive use towards better quality. While many folks have helped us with this, Whissi is consistenytly insisting on good QA policies for a long time now, and he always was persistent in fighting with me when I did not understand the value or did not want to. Whissi, I admit I sometimes wasn’t too fond of you, but believe me, at the end of the day I *really* value what you are doing. You have my deepest respect. Looking forward to many more years of discussions!

Category: software quality

Squash your Pull Requests!

rsyslog 8.31 – an important release