[Pkg-anonymity-tools] ooniprobe maintenance in Debian

[Arturo Filastò]

Hi intrigeri,

Thanks for starting this.

On 2/2/15 5:32 PM, intrigeri wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Arturo told me that the only blocker for the release of ooniprobe
> 1.2.3 upstream is some testing to confirm that it works fine on
> Debian, which is their primary target platform.
> 
> So, here are a few questions:
> 
> * Is it good enough to test the upstream code from a Git checkout,
>   using only dependencies found in Debian, on current Debian unstable?
>   Or do we have to also prepare a ~rc package, or even a preliminary
>   backport for Wheezy, and test that?
> 
> * Why not tag a release candidate upstream, that we can package and
>   upload for example to Debian experimental?
> 

I have just tagged a release candidate for ooniprobe 1.2.3 and pushed it
to pypi:
https://gitweb.torproject.org/ooni-probe.git/tag/?id=v1.2.3-rc1
https://pypi.python.org/packages/source/o/ooniprobe/ooniprobe-1.2.3rc1.tar.gz#md5=1a531e4127499b86b71fa132ae07aa67


> * Lunar has been maintaining ooniprobe (and its dependencies?) on his
>   own so far. I guess that he wouldn't mind sharing the maintenance on
>   the long term (correct me if I'm wrong, of course) and... packaging
>   also loves company ;) I'm *not* implying here that Lunar is doing
>   a bad job at it, or that we actually have a problem to solve.
> 
>   Putting ooniprobe under the pkg-anonymity-tools team's umbrella
>   seems like a far stretch to me, regarding the scope of this team.
>   Still, I believe it is the closest team we currently have, and
>   I doubt that creating yet another team would be a smart move: it
>   does include some overhead to create and maintain infrastructure.
>   So I'm undecided.
> 

It would be great to have ooniprobe be part of that, let me know if
there is something I can do to facilitate such process.

>   Also, personally my plate is full enough, so I can't promise to help
>   much -- I've never run ooniprobe myself! But I could certainly,
>   along with someone else (Ulrike?), make myself familiar with the
>   package, in order to occasionally act as a backup if needed.
> 
>   Is anyone else interested in ooniprobe maintenance? Does anyone know
>   of any Debian maintainer running OONI probes, or a Globaleaks
>   contributor willing to dive deeper into the Debian world?


Ian, an ooni developer, said he was also interested in helping out with
this, hence I am adding him to cc.


On 2/3/15 10:22 AM, Lunar wrote:> intrigeri:
>
> Well, the idea was to deliver a system-wide cronjob. This requires
> several important changes to how ooniprobe stores its config, data, and
> produced files. Both are impossible to properly handle with the last
> released version.
>
> Work is available:
>
https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/collab-maint/ooniprobe.git/log/?h=pu/system-wide-cron
>
> It is missing a weekly cron that would call oonireport to retry
> submiting reports in case of problems during the daily cron. oonireport
> should also be called somewhere else (the daily cron?) to remove reports
> that have been successfully sent. The logcheck rules need to be updated
> to not care about ooni reports.
>
> This also needs more testing for corner cases, and then history cleanup.
> So far, at every single stage of testing I have found things problematic
> with how upstream code worked.
>

Thanks a lot for helping us out by pointing out all the various issues
you have encountered while working on that.

I believe they are all now fixed, but if that is not the case I would be
very happy to finish solving them.

~ Arturo