Taskotron Has Replaced AutoQA

It's getting on 2 years since I started working on the demo bits that would become the first demonstration of a system that would come to be known as Taskotron. Since that time, the project has gone through a name change, a lot of planning and more work than I would have liked but we've reached our first major milestone - AutoQA has been replaced!

The changeover should be pretty transparent for most users - we turned off AutoQA's scheduler on Friday and thus far, nobody has complained or noticed in a public way. At this point, we aren't trying to do many outwordly "new" things, just reduce the number of systems which we need to support and lay the groundwork for the features which have been "real soon now" for the last several years. AutoQA's logs will remain available for at least a couple more weeks but it will be turned off for good before too long.

If you're interested in learning more about Taskotron, some good reference links are:

Going forward, our next "big thing" will be support for disposable clients which might sound a bit generic on the outside but is one of the reasons that we started Taskotron instead of just improving AutoQA. As a quick summary, disposable clients are task execution environments which are created for each task and destroyed after the completion of that task.

Disposable clients will allow us to support more types of tasks (potentially destructive checks have been requested before) and more importantly, start opening the door to accepting tasks from any Fedora contributor. Disposable clients will involve a significant amount of work and we're balancing that with test work for Fedora 21 so I don't expect this functionality to land until 2015.

As with most projects of this nature, many people have made it possible from initial concept and development to testing, patching and deployment. It's been amazing to see Taskotron arrive at this first major milestone and I'm looking forward to many more milestones in the future.