Monday 25 September 2023

Re: Retention period for autopkgtest test logs

On Mon, Sep 25, 2023 at 1:18 PM Bryce Harrington <bryce.harrington@canonical.com> wrote:
On Mon, Sep 25, 2023 at 10:23:36AM -0700, Brian Murray wrote:
> Currently test results and log files for autopkgtest runs are kept until
> the release for which the test was run reaches its End of Life. This is
> also true for autopkgtest runs for packages in PPAs and the Ubuntu QA
> team thinks we should not be keeping these for such a long period of
> time.
>
> We plan to automatically remove test results for PPAs which ran more
> than 8 weeks ago. Does 8 weeks seem like too short of a period to
> anybody?

It does feel a bit short; prior results can sometimes be interesting for
comparison purposes, although even that value diminishes quickly over
time.  Is there a strong reason to favor 8 weeks vs. say 26 weeks
(i.e. our development cycle length)?

Bryce

I would also recommend a longer period, at least 12 or 16 weeks. The selfish reasoning is that this would give us at least 2 kernel SRU cycles worth of (hopefully) passing logs to use when triaging a failure.
 
Francis
--
Francis Ginther
Canonical - Kernel