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Portage Package Upgrade Initiative

How to add/update a package

Read the "Portage New & Upgrade Package Process".

Note: The following material is old - we do not maintain this process anymore.

Purpose

Many of the Portage packages that we use today as part of the Chromium OS image are outdated with respect to the latest version available from upstream Gentoo (Portage). Some are very outdated. This site serves as the coordination point for an effort to upgrade our packages to recent versions.

To spread out the effort of upgrading hundreds of packages each package should be associated with one owner from among Chromium OS contributors. Volunteer owners are always welcome, but where they are not received packages are assigned to owners through technical teams.

Package status and ownership is maintained on the Portage Package Status spreadsheet. Package owners can check that spreadsheet at any time to see if any of their packages are out of date. The second sheet of the spreadsheet presents the data statistically and with pretty charts.

What you should do

Check the package status spreadsheet, and claim ownership of packages that you think you should own (all chromium.org accounts can edit the document). This is a team effort, and we need everyone to do their part. If you think you are best positioned to evaluate/test an upgrade, then you are the logical owner. Perhaps you work on projects that use that package extensively. Please only edit the "Owner" and "Owner Notes" columns. Edits in other columns will be overwritten by the update process.

To complete ownership coverage beyond volunteers, packages are assigned to technical leads who are then responsible for assigning individual ownership. The "Team/Lead" column is for this purpose.

As a package owner, whenever you are ready you should upgrade the outdated packages that you own. See the "How to update a package" section for details.

Managing upgrade process

There is a "Tracker" column in the spreadsheet for linking to a Tracker issue for a package that needs an upgrade. This column is managed by the sync_package_status script. The script runs daily as part of the refresh-packages builder, but only for teams that have opted in to this process. It can also be run by team leads or package owners whenever they like. It is provided as a convenience. Run the following from within your chroot to get started:

sync_package_status --help

Most likely, you will want to run sync_package_status for either a team or for an individual. Those examples are given below (again, run inside your chroot). Remove the "--pretend" option if you are satisfied with the results:


sync_package_status --pretend --team=build
sync_package_status --pretend --owner=chromiumuser

To see statistics and charts about the upgrade progress of the entire team or your group, see the Stats worksheet of the same spreadsheet.

To disable the filing of Tracker issues for a single package, change the "Tracker" column value for that package's row to "disable".

Spreadsheet Legend

In the "State On <arch>" column:

In the "Package" column:

FAQ

Q: Where does the spreadsheet information come from?

A: It comes from gathering package information for boards 'x86-generic' and 'arm-generic' over each of the following targets: 'virtual/target-os', 'virtual/target-os-dev', and 'virtual/target-os-test', as well as the chroot host (amd64) over each of the following targets: 'world', and 'virtual/target-sdk'.

Q: Who is maintaining the package status spreadsheet?

A: The update process for the spreadsheet is maintained by the build team; send questions to chromium-os-dev@chromium.org.

Q: Who can access the spreadsheet?

A: Use your chromium.org account to access the spreadsheet for automatic "view and edit" privileges. If you don't have a chromium.org account, simply request access to the document (you have the option to do so after trying to access the document) and you will be given "view" privileges.

Q: I got a Tracker issue asking me to upgrade package FOO, but we don't want to upgrade package FOO. How do I exclude FOO from the automatic issue filer?

A: In the packages spreadsheet, find the row for package FOO and change the Tracker value for that row to be "disable".

Q: How often is the package status data in the spreadsheet updated?

A: The update process is executed daily as part of the refresh-packages buildbot.

Q: How do I tell when the package status data in the spreadsheet was last updated?

A: Go to File -> See revision history, the look for the last time the "bugdroid" user edited the spreadsheet. Or look at the refresh packages builder to see when it last ran to completion.

Q: Why can't I access the spreadsheet, even when I use my chromium.org account?

A: This happened to at least a couple people, and the solution was to convert their account to GA+. Contact Mark Larson.

Q: Are there any free, open-source utilities that could help with this effort?

A: We are aware of euscan. It was evaluated for use with Chromium OS, and the results can be found in this doc.