Whats going on with Squid 4

Those that have been paying attention will have noticed that Squid-4 beta cycle has been going on for a very, very long time. A whole year now in fact. There are several reasons for this.

* The ecosystem that Squid is deployed into has a somewhat mixed situation in regards to C++11.

Even 5 years after it was standardized compiler support is still not readily available in some popular OS distributions. In particular there are a large number of people clinging to the outdated but still supported RHEL 6 and its derived family of OS which do not easily provide recent versions of GCC. So we are procrastinating on the deprecation of Squid-3.5 to give more people a chance to move on. The clock is ticking though.

* We had a lack of early adopters testing the early versions of Squid-4.

So bugs that only show up in real usage have been very slow to be found. We don’t make a new version start its beta cycle until the developers are reasonably sure that its stable enough to be used. The beta process is supposed to be just a confirmaton of that. Indeed a year ago 4.x looked like it had no bugs at all. Which is kind of suspicious, but not impossible. As the betas progressed though the bug reports started rolling in. It is somewhat a testament to how our modern build systems are catching out minor and trivial bugs that these tester reported issues have largely all been difficult to resolve.

* We are experimenting with a new management process for Squid releases.

Previously Squid-5 would have been branched for development and Squid-4 starting to stagnate, er, become “stable”. This time though we have delayed the branching and instead kept Squid-4 as main development branch for minor changes while the beta cycle goes on. That has made it a little more volatile than most of the Squid-3 series betas.

All up, we are down to the last few major bugs to be resolved in the new code. Progress on those is slow but steady. So Squid-4 production “stable” release should be not to far ahead on the calendar.

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Continuous Integration

For the last few years there has been a slow growing improvement to the testing and QA Squid is subject to. This last week has seen the construction and rollout  of a full-scale build farm to replace some of our simple internal testing. Robert Collins covers the growth process in his blog.

Here is the initial release notice:

Hi, a few of us dev’s have been working on getting a build-test environment up and running. We’re still doing fine tuning on it but the basic facility is working.

We’d love it if users of squid, both individuals and corporates, would consider contributing a test machine to the buildfarm.

The build farm is at http://build.squid-cache.org/ with docs about it at http://wiki.squid-cache.org/BuildFarm.

What we’d like is to have enough machines that are available to run test builds, that we can avoid having last-minute scrambles to fix things at releases.

If you have some spare bandwidth and CPU cycles you can easily volunteer.

We don’t need test slaves to be on all the time – if they aren’t on they won’t run tests, but they will when the come on. We’d prefer machines that are always on over some-times on.

We only do test builds on volunteer machines after a ‘master’ job has passed on the main server. This avoids using resources up when something is clearly busted in the main source code.

Each version of squid we test takes about 150MB on disk when idle, and when a test is going on up to twice that (because of the build test scripts).

We currently test:

• 2.HEAD
• 3.0
• 3.1
• 3.HEAD

I suspect we’ll add 2.7 to that list. So I guess we’ll use abut 750MB of disk if a given slave is testing all those versions.

Hudson, our build test software, can balance out the machines though – if we have two identical platforms they will each get some of the builds to test.

So, if your favorite operating system is not currently represented in the build farm, please let us know – drop a mail here or to noc @ squid-cache.org – we’ll be delighted to hear from you, and it will help ensure that squid is building well on your OS!

-Rob

That just about covers everything. Hardware and build software requirements are listed in the build farm page.

Hi, a few of us dev's have been working on getting a build-test
environment up and running. We're still doing fine tuning on it but the
basic facility is working.

We'd love it if users of squid, both individuals and corporates, would
consider contributing a test machine to the buildfarm.

The build farm is at http://build.squid-cache.org/ with docs about it at
http://wiki.squid-cache.org/BuildFarm.

What we'd like is to have enough machines that are available to run test
builds, that we can avoid having last-minute scrambles to fix things at
releases.

If you have some spare bandwidth and CPU cycles you can easily
volunteer. 

We don't need test slaves to be on all the time - if they aren't on they
won't run tests, but they will when the come on. We'd prefer machines
that are always on over some-times on.

We only do test builds on volunteer machines after a 'master' job has
passed on the main server. This avoids using resources up when something
is clearly busted in the main source code.

Each version of squid we test takes about 150MB on disk when idle, and
when a test is going on up to twice that (because of the build test
scripts).

We currently test
2.HEAD
3.0
3.1
3.HEAD

and I suspect we'll add 2.7 to that list. So I guess we'll use abut
750MB of disk if a given slave is testing all those versions.

Hudson, our build test software, can balance out the machines though -
if we have two identical platforms they will each get some of the builds
to test.

So, if your favorite operating system is not currently represented in
the build farm, please let us know - drop a mail here or to noc @
squid-cache.org - we'll be delighted to hear from you, and it will help
ensure that squid is building well on your OS!

-Rob

Life of a Beta

From early inception when the developers have nothing but dreams for it.  Through the coding and arguments about what should be included and how. Through the alpha testing with its harrowing hours pondering obscure code from last decade. Even the odd period of panic as security bugs are whispered about behind closed doors. Such is the early life of software.

Two weeks ago word went out that 3.1 was reaching end-game.

This part of the release lifecycle seems to be going well. Packages appearing very slowly as QA throws demanding eyes on the code and making us actually fix things. Don’t be fooled by the packages out already, they have been in QA for a few months to get this far. On that note:

NetBSD, Gentoo, Ubuntu, FreeBSD and RedHat already have packages ready and available for at least testing use if you know where to look (ie the links right there might be a good start).

Debian has a bit more QA to go as of the writing, but the maintainer tells me there will be packages out soon.

OpenBSD and Mac turned out at the last minute to be running split-stack IPv6 implementations (for security apparently). All the documentation read in two years left the impression it was a Windows XP anarchism (and who runs XP Pro on a server?), so support was delayed and delayed.  The OpenBSD maintainer and someone interested from Mac are working with myself on closing that gap in the features.

There may be more OS with 3.1 packages. I’ve only begun working my way down the distrowatch.org popularity list to see which OS do and who to contact. Squid has bundles on over 600 OS apparently.

If you know who does the official packaging for your OS and whether there are 3.1 packages ready, please do me a favor and mention it. I’m seeking a web page where to find the squid (or squid3/squid30/squid31) package information and also the place where distro bug reports about Squid might end up.

What is holding 3.1 back?

One of the major changes we made to 3.1 during its life cycle was the introduction of first-past-the-post feature additions instead of pre-planned and sealed roadmaps. Combined with a regular short release timeline instead of indeterminate long testing periods.

So why has 3.1 taken more beta releases than 3.0?

Unfortunately before that policy was implemented we did go down the old track a fair way and guaranteed that several features would make it into 3.1.  One of these (SourceLayout) has proven to be a lot of slow work. (Not major re-writing thankfully).

The other new features code for 3.1 have been tested and stabilized between 3.1.0.1 and 3.1.0.6 and are happily in use on many production environments.  But this last remaining feature still has a lot to go in and be tested for bugs. The result is 6 months delay on 3.1 and a handful of extra candidate releases, even some blockage of new stuff ready to go into 3.HEAD for the next release.

3.2 is starting off without this old legacy blocking problem, so it should be the first release to really gain the benefit of a much faster testing and release stages of production.

There are also a bunch of bugs which seem to be important but we are unable to track down and fix yet. Mostly holdovers from 3.0. The basic policy is to block release until all open bugs major or higher are closed. We might downgrade bugs to normal though if they are voted to be ignored.

While we wait for the last feature to stabilize some of us still try to work away at that list, additional volunteers are very welcome to speed things up.  Meanwhile I would like some opinions please about the final stage for 3.1: