After discussions at the LAVA Users Forum at Connect SFO15 [0], the LAVA team have arranged for some changes in the mailing lists to make it easier to announce and manage the upcoming changes from the ongoing refactoring.

https://lists.linaro.org/mailman/listinfo/lava-users - a discussion list amongst users for users, with some admins listening in and helping out. Users in this sense includes test writers and administrators of LAVA instances outside Linaro. It is particularly aimed at those running LAVA in places where Linaro is not necessarily aware of the install. I'm not asking for LAVA instances to declare themselves, it is free software after all, it is an offer of assistance and a request that users take advantage of the support available to manage the implications of the refactoring for their own use cases. Please feel free to initiate threads and discuss issues and problems on the lava-users list.

As a reminder, for those who use LAVA but have not recently been to a Connect, the dispatcher is being refactored and this had led to advancements and modifications in the lava-server as well as a completely re-written job submission format. LAVA is retaining compatibility *only* with the Lava Test Shell Definitions (the YAML files people are currently using) and there can be no automated way of converting existing JSON job submissions to the new job submission format (which uses YAML to allow for comments, amongst other improvements).

The timetable for these changes is expected to cover most of 2016. After https://validation.linaro.org/ has migrated to the new code, the current dispatcher code will start to be removed from the upstream in 2017.

One result of these changes is that as the Linaro production instance migrates away from the current dispatcher codebase, there is a likelihood of some breakage in some parts of the current dispatcher. (This is one of the primary reasons why the dispatcher is being refactored.)

The refactoring introduces a lot of benefits, including much more robust communication between the workers and the master, removal of configuration on the workers so that admins only change things in one place, a lot of new methods within the dispatcher to support new types of test and a much cleaner, more modular, codebase for future development.

Also, the Linaro Validation Mailman List linaro-validation@lists.linaro.org is to be renamed (keeping linaro-validation as an alias) to lava-devel for consistency with lava-users and lava-announce. There will be a separate email to the linaro-validation list about these changes shortly.

These new mailing lists will be included in the documentation included in next release of the LAVA software (2015.10). Documentation of the new code is already in the master branch of lava-server and installed via the lava-server-doc package and the initial code for the refactoring is being developed in parallel with the current code. This list will be used to announce when the refactoring codebase is ready for admins to begin migrating tests and test writers to the new code and methods - currently, the new dispatcher is developer only. At SFO15, there was also an update on the state of the refactoring. [1]

lava-announce will continue to be a low volume list. Reply-To has been set to the linaro-validation mailing list (transparently migrating to lava-devel once the linaro-validation alias is in place).

The LAVA developers would ask that everyone running LAVA would subscribe to at least the lava-announce mailing list, to help with the migration to the new support.

Videos will be available for most meetings at SFO15 in due course. The slides are already available.

[0] https://sfo15.pathable.com/meetings/302656 [1] https://sfo15.pathable.com/meetings/303074