#language en
We're trying to design something for CollaborativeMaintenance. Check the actual source code in the repository :
 * [[http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/collab-maint/lib/trunk/|web interface]]
 * Anonymous checkout: svn co svn://svn.debian.org/collab-maint/lib/trunk collab-maint
 * svn co svn+ssh://svn.debian.org/svn/collab-maint/lib/trunk collab-maint

= Additional requirements =

 * While the original proposal speaks only of subversion, we want to be able to support various VCS since people tend to have very strong opinion about the best VCS.
 * The infrastructure can be imagined as a natural extension of "dak" (the tools used by ftpmasters), so we may well inspire our work from dak itself.
   * Thus the suggestion is to write everything in Python.

= Overview =

The infrastructure obviously needs a configuration file in which you give :
 * which respositories (svn/bzr/cvs/...) needs to be considered
 * which APT sources will be used as reference for comparison of the packages
   * need to support several distributions (Ubuntu/Debian/whatever)
   * need to support several sources per distro

Given the amount of data involved, we need a (little) database to keep a cache of the most important information. And the database will probably also store some meta-information about the status of each package (see the kind of meta-information needed on CollaborativeMaintenance).

Many scripts are needed.
Server side scripts:
 * update the database with new infos from read-only "!PkgRepository" (in particular APT deb-src repositories)
 * incremental update script: update database with new infos from a specific package (useful to launch by trigger on SVN commit for example)
 * a script maintaining an aptable repository with all the latest version of the source packages maintained in the infrastrucure
 * various CGI
 * intelligent hook scripts to send "diff" to the PTS
Client side:
 * Download last source from VCS or APT repositories.
 * Run a complete "test suite":
   * build in pbuiler
   * followed by lintian
   * debdiff against last package in unstable/experimental

= Modules =

== PkgRepository ==

!PkgRepository is an interface (or an abstract object or whatever) that will be implemented by all modules providing support for a specific kind of "package repository" :
 * subversion repository created by svn-buildpackage
 * bzr/cvs/whatever repository
 * normal APT deb-src repository

It should provide following services :
 * lists the packages available in the repository
   * We suppose/require that each package is available only once in a repository.
 * give properties about each package (''wouldn't a Sources file provide that?'')
   * current version
   * target distribution (extracted from changelog)
   * URL of original/upstream source tarball
   * some other meta-information (see examples on CollaborativeMaintenance)
 * possibility to generate a "source package" from current version (.dsc, orig.tar.gz, .diff.gz)
If the repository is "writable", it should also provide the following service :
 * possibility to replace the current version of the package with a source package retrieved somewhere else (=> possibility to reinject an external upload)

Each instance of such a module is given a directory that it can use for its purpose.

== FileCache ==

We obviously will have to download lots of files from Debian/Ubuntu mirrors (Sources packages mainly) and we need a smart cache if we don't want a full mirror copy sitting on the server and if we don't want to download the same files again and again.