As many folks already know, Flock was in Cape Cod for 2017 and the format this year was a bit different than previous years - the emphasis was more on "doing" than focusing on talking about what had been done and what's planned for the upcoming year.
What I Did
Taking the new emphasis for Flock to heart, I wanted to make sure that I got something finished before the end of the week. There has been a lot of talk around the standard test roles and CI and while the initial focus of that CI pipeline is on Fedora Atomic, there are other not-quite-atomic groups who are interested in getting tests run at various points (koji build, module build, etc.) in Fedora's lifecycle.
In the interest of enabling more tests sooner, I spent quite a bit of time working on a standard test role shim for Taskotron so that interested folks can start contributing tests and seeing the results of those tests.
There is still an open issue in taskotron-trigger which is keeping us from enabling the task but I'm hopeful that we're pretty close to having that ready to enable.
I got started on another idea to make it easier to show test results in Pagure but that's going to have to wait for another day as I didn't get terribly far with it.
Notable Sessions
I didn't go to any bad sessions, there were a couple that I think are worth summarizing here.
Packagers: Working with automated test systems
One of the things which has seen tremendous progress over the last couple years is the amount of testing which is coming out of the openQA instance we have running for Fedora.
For every update in Bodhi containing whitelisted or critical path packages, our openQA instance will run through a set of basic functionality tests designed to make sure that nothing broke horribly once the update in question is applied. The results of these tests will also show up in bodhi so that interested parties are able to inspect the results and fix any broken-ness before it's introduced to stable repositories.
Adam Williamson did a great job of going through what the tests are and how to interpret any errors which may show up. I don't think that his session has been posted online as of yet but most of the details are in his various blog posts on that subject.
One idea which resurfaced during this session was the idea of having a "rerun tests" button in bodhi's UI to allow for easy test re-runs in the event that a transient error is responsible for failures instead of anything which can be fixed in the update in question.
Becoming a Container Maintainer
I've had my eye on the layered image build service for a while now and it was great to get some concrete information on how to start contributing Dockerfiles that are built and hosted as part of Fedora.
The container review guidelines have changed a bit as the process has been finalized but is in a far more understandable state now.
The whole session went over creating a Dockerfile which complies to the standards set by Fedora and how to go through the process of having a contributed Dockerfile reviewed before it is included in Fedora's registry.
Summary
I'm grateful that I was given the opportunity to attend Flock this year and I'm looking forward to demonstrating the benefit of having contributors gather in one place for these events. Now, back to work for me :)