Development process¶

The LAVA development process is based on git. The various source code repositories are hosted on the lavasoftware GitLab instance.

The LAVA team is spread geographically around the world, with members in multiple countries. We can often be found talking on our IRC channel #lavasoftware on irc.libera.chat.

The LAVA codebase is all Free and Open Source Software, and we welcome third party contributions and new team members. Developers are recommended to join us on the lava-devel mailing list to discuss development ideas and issues.

Design meeting¶

The LAVA design meeting is where the team gets together to work out deep technical issues, and to agree on future development goals and ideas. We set priorities for core LAVA development here, and agree on what will go into upcoming releases.

We hold this meeting weekly every Wednesday at 13:00 to 14:00 UTC as a video conference using Google Hangouts Meet: https://meet.google.com/usu-aatj-fht. Summaries of the discussions are posted to the lava-devel mailing list afterwards for the benefit of those unable to attend.

If you wish to attend to discuss an issue, it is worth mentioning it in advance on the mailing list first so that your topic is expected and can be added to the agenda.

Release process¶

LAVA is developed on an approximately monthly release schedule. Some months do not include a release, this can be due to conference attendance or other reasons. Subscribe to the lava-announce mailing list for updates.

Releases are based on git tags named to follow a YYYY.MM (year, month) pattern. Should we need to release an upgrade to any existing release (such as for a critical bug fix), we use the post suffix and sequential number (YYYY.MM.postN).

Note

There can be a delay between the upload of the next release to Debian and the LAVA repositories (production repo) and the deployment of that same release onto validation.linaro.org. The actual version installed can be seen in the header of the each page of the documentation.

The process itself consists of testing the master branch deployments on staging.validation.linaro.org, merging the master branch into the staging branch to create a release candidate, followed by merging the release candidate into the release branch and creating the git tags.

During the testing of the release candidate, changes can continue to be merged into master. Changes which are intended to go into the release candidate are cherry picked using Gerrit into the staging branch.

Releases¶

Releases are made to Debian and announced on the lava-announce mailing list. A lot of information is directly accessible from the Debian Tracker pages for each project:

lava-server tracker: https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/lava-server

lava-dispatcher tracker: https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/lava-dispatcher

Reporting Bugs¶

New bugs should be reported via the LAVA Users mailing list. You will need to subscribe to the list to be able to post.

Please describe the problem clearly:

Give the version of LAVA software you are using, as reported by dpkg -l lava-server lava-dispatcher
Attach all relevant configuration and log portions. If you are using LAVA with your own device, provide the full Jinja2 template, device dictionary and test job submission as well as the complete test job output.

If you were using our public LAVA instance, the one used by Linaro for daily activities (https://validation.linaro.org), try to include a link to a page that manifests the problem. That will make debugging easier.