Arch Testing Team

The Arch Testing Team is a group within the Arch community in charge of making sure that packages submitted to the testing repositories are functional. This includes, making sure that the package installs correctly, that it does not cause breakage with packages of which it depends on, among others.

Arch Testers sign off packages after vouching for their correctness so that they can be moved from the testing repositories into the core or extra repositories.

Contributing

You can apply to be an official Arch tester by sending an email to arch-testing-accounts@archlinux.org and requesting a tester account, specifying at least your desired username.

If you are given a tester account, you should be able to log in into archweb and see a signoffs tab on it. The signoffs tab will contain a list of packages that are currently in the testing repositories and need at least two signoffs (i.e., a rubber-stamp vouching for the correctness of a package).

You may then test the listed packages locally and signing them off if they are correct by clicking on the signoff button for each package.

Tip: You can simplify the process by signing off packages from the command line with signoff(1) from the arch-signoff package.

Guidelines

In order to test an arch package, keep the following aspects in mind:

If you are testing a kernel or a package that relies on kernel modules, you should restart the machine and ensure that it boots correctly.
Although testing on virtualization software is not prohibited, it may not be as useful as testing a package in a bare-metal installation. This applies specially to packages that are susceptible to different types of hardware, such as kernel packages.
If you are testing a library, you may want to execute a binary that uses such library. Make sure the shared object file is loaded using ldd.
Likewise, if there is a package that ships executables, testing their basic functionality is encouraged.
If you notice an error when testing a package, follow the Bug reporting guidelines to create an issue.

Warning: When using the kde-unstable repository, one should be aware of eventual expected bugs with Qt applications that do not belong to the KDE plasma ecosystem (due to private ABI changes). If you are facing an issue with such applications, ideally reproduce it on a testing environment that does not have the kde-unstable repository enabled before reporting it.

Coordination

Note: It is expected that people using the testing repositories frequently check the arch-dev-public mailing list for any announced changes or considerations affecting testing users.

You can coordinate with other testers on the #archlinux-testing IRC channel.