Automatic Packages for Everything (backports, new upstream versions, etc.)
Confirmed Mentor: Lucas Nussbaum
How to contact the mentor: mailto:lucas@debian.org
Desirable skills: Debian packaging (including tools to build and test Debian packages), version control systems (Git)
Application tasks: Prepare a backport for a package already in Debian, provide logs of sbuild and autopkgtest. The more complex the package, the better. Bonus points if the packaging work is done inside Git.
Project description:
Many packaging tasks can be automated, and are likely to succeed without any human intervention:
- creating a backport for Debian stable from a packaging in Debian testing
- upgrading a package to a newer upstream version
packaging a simple Perl, Python or Ruby using one of the tools listed on AutomaticPackagingTools
However, doing those tasks still require Debian packaging knowledge.
As a step towards Debian's world domination, it would be great if we could automate those tasks and provide ready-to-use Debian packages, so that users are left with a deb-based alternative when there are no packages for their needs in Debian itself, instead of using upstream packages or building from source. So the goal of this project is to experiment with the idea of a service that would distribute unofficial Debian packages for the above scenarios.
Typically, that service would deal with:
- determining which packages should be generated
- generating those packages
- using several methods to detect problems (e.g. piuparts, autopkgtest tests)
- publishing them
The expected outcomes and deliverables are:
an evaluation of the feasibility of the approach (how many packages fail to build? fail tests?), maybe represented as an Alluvial diagram?
- running infrastructure (most likely on one of Debian's cloud partners, given the need for processing power)
- code to provision and configure such an infrastructure
References: