Page History

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At 0830 UTC, the build/mkupdates/run_nightly script is run from svn trunk. This runs the script build/mkupdates/listpromotable, which queries the rule-QA web app for the previous day's rule accuracy figures, and determines which rules from the rules source dirs (rulesrc/core and rulesrc/sandbox/*) are to be promoted to the active ruleset, as described in RuleLifeCycle.

Promotion Criteria

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You can see the previous day's accuracy figures \[http://buildbot.spamassassin.org/ruleqa/?daterev=last-night at this URL\]. Promotable rules show up in dark text on the [RuleQaApp], non-promoted-by-default rules show up in light grey text.

The promotion criteria are detailed on some other wiki page, RulesProjPromotion perhaps? (TODO).

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• "tflags nopublish" rules are never published
• rules with a T_ prefix to their names are never published - if you're getting these in a normal installation, you should probably report a bug.
• rules do not currently need an explicit "tflags publish" line to be published but the existence of either "tflags publish" or "tflags nopublish" is recommended to make it clear that the rule is intended to be published if it meets the promotion criteria.
• "tflags ", " net", "userconf" or "learn" rules are always published
• rules that fail lint – if that can be attributed to the rule! – are not published
• rules that require a plugin that build/mkupdates/listpromotable thinks is not part of the default plugin set, are not published
  

A proposed update checkin is created with a new list of 'active' rules , is created in the file 'rules/active.list'; this is immediately checked in.

The Active List

The active list, in the form of the file rules/active.list is checked in to SVN trunk, and is used by build/mkrules to determine which rules are active.

• Rules marked active, and their dependencies (if they're meta rules), are written to rules/72_active.cf;
  
• Rules which are not in the active list, but which were loaded from a sandbox directory in rulesrc/sandbox/*, are written to rules/70_sandbox.cf, and renamed to always include a T_ prefix;
  
• Rules which are not in the active list, but which were loaded from a core-rules dir in rulesrc/core, are written to rules/70_inactive.cf.
  

More info on these rule states can be found at RuleLifeCycle.

build/mkrules attempts to keep the contents of those files consistent. In other words, meta subrules for a rule in the active list will always likewise be copied to the active file – even if they are sandbox T_ rules. It will also ignore rules that are inside an ifplugin block for a plugin that is not available.

rules/70_sandbox.cf and rules/70_inactive.cf are used for development, and for mass-checks, but will not be installed during
make install and are not packaged in sa-update tarballs. Rules in rules/70_sandbox.cf are the only ones used in the "bbmass_ " preflight mass-checks.

The sa-update Tarball

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The cron jobs run as the user _ updatesd''. The crontab looks like:

30 8 * * * bash /home/updatesd/svn/spamassassin/build/mkupdates/run_nightly > /var/www/buildbot.spamassassin.org/updatesd/mkupdates.txt 2>&1
50 8 * * * bash /home/updatesd/svn/spamassassin/build/mkupdates/run_part2 > /var/www/buildbot.spamassassin.org/updatesd/mkupdatespt2.txt 2>&1

SA-Update Mirrors

sa-update uses the MIRRORED.BY file to provide distributed update capabilities. The setup for a mirror is described in SaUpdateMirrorSetup.

The Other End

See RuleUpdates for details on running "sa-update".