Bodhi 2 update management infrastructure to land after Fedora 21 release

Day 1 of Flock 2014 saw a talk from Fedora Infrastructure developer Luke Macken on the evolution of the Fedora update infrastructure, notably the Bodhi update system Fedora employs to manage package updates. A video of this talk is available here.

bodhi2-large

Once upon a time in Fedora Core 1 through Fedora Core 3, updates were handled via a manual process involving emails to release engineering. Starting with Fedora Core 4, a private internal updating system that was available only to Red Hat employees.

The modern world of Bodhi began in Fedora 7 at the same time that Fedora Core and Fedora extras were merged. It introduced the concept of Karma and it was written in TurboGears 1.x and it is still in production today, seven years and many revisions later.

Bodhi does a lot of things behind the scenes, being both extremely intricate and very inefficient. Luke described a number of issues that have cropped up over the years, including inflexible SQL routines and the karma process outliving its usefulness.

Luke next took a little side-trip to tell us about some of the more entertaining glitches that have cropped up over the years, including the infamous Fedora 9 GPG re-keying and numerous crashes during update pushes.

After that, he moved on to discussing the plans for the Bodhi2 project. The plan is to have it land sometime after the Fedora 21 release. We don’t want to rely on it for zero-day updates, but we’ll phase it in soon after and it should hopefully be a graceful transition.

Some of the major changes in Bodhi2 will be a comprehensive REST API, a new and improved command-line tool and major changes to the UI that should provide a better experience for the users.

Another great feature of Bodhi2 is that it will integrate with fedmsg and the new Fedora Message Service to reduce the amount of “spam” email that Bodhi sends out. Luke dives in a bit to talk about the datagrepper and datanommer mining tools that power the notification service and the set of filters that you can opt into.

Luke showed off how Bodhi2 will be tightly integrated with Taskotron to perform automated testing on updates, as well as the integration with the Fedora Badges (there are lots of them available for Bodhi!) and then on to the feedback system. He called out both the fedora-easy-karma command-line tool and the fedora-gooey-karma GUI tool for managing karma updates on Bodhi1 (and noted that they will be working together to support Bodhi2 as well).

Then he went and left me slack-jawed with the new submitter process, automating almost everything and making it almost unbelievably simple. Adding to that, the new karma system allows the submitter to select fine-grained karma controls, so they can request that specific tests have to pass karma before accepting it into the stable repository.

The talk finished up with some prognosticating about the future, particularly talking about being able to run AMI and other cloud image updates through as well.

Fedora Project community

1 Comment

  1. Luya Tshimbalanga

    That reminds me to refresh the existing logo design for bodhi 2.

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