The Debian Archive Operations Team

Infrastructure

Interacting with the team

Task description

This team, commonly referred to as Archive team, oversees and maintains the well-being of Debian's official package repositories.

Operating the archive

The Archive team (FIXME: Archivars?) are responsible for maintaining the infrastructure required to support the archive. This takes the form of the scripts used for processing uploaded packages, but also the flow of packages between distributions.

One thing that the Archive team is explicitly not responsible for is the maintenance of the mirror network. This is handled by the mirror team.

Supporting the Release Managers

The Archive team does not determine policy for the flow of packages from unstable to testing, nor they run the scripts that control the process. Similarly, the Archive team does not determine which packages should make up stable point releases.

However, they are responsible for ensuring that the packages move into/are available in the various releases correctly (as defined by the Release Managers).

Of course, the Archive team is also responsible for the final movement of packages from testing into stable at the time of release, following the instructions of the release managers.

Accepting and rejecting packages

When a package is uploaded to the unstable or experimental suite, the Archive team is responsible if it falls into these categories:

  1. If it is a new version of an existing package and adds no new binary packages, it is moved into the package pool automatically.
  2. Some uploads are not traditional Debian packages (installer images, for example) and are classified as BYHAND to indicate that they require manual processing.

Four times a day (see count-down), the archive is updated to reflect new packages, with the changes then distributed across the mirrors.

Maintaining the state of packages and the archive

The Archive Operations Team members have the opportunity to alter the priority and section of binary packages at any time. This information is stored in the overrides file, which in turn is used to generate the packages file in the archive. Historically, this was required because packages did not contain priority and section information. Nowadays this allows a greater level of consistency in package placement, and is most useful when new sections (and, in theory, new priorities) are created.

Package removal is also important. This falls into two classes - binary packages that are no longer required because the source package no longer builds them, and requests for removals of packages. The archive is regularly scanned for binary packages that are no longer built or which are otherwise unnecessary, and the results are mailed daily to the Archive Team. After checking that this is intended, Archive Team members will then remove the package.

(FIXME_whole_paragraph) The standard way to request removal of a package is to file a bug against ftp.debian.org. This may be because of difficulties with the package license, because the maintainer no longer wishes the package to be in Debian or because there are legal issues associated with the package. In this case, the Archive Team members must manually remove the package.

Maintaining the Debian Archive Kit

Archive Team is the primary maintainer of the Debian Archive Kit (dak). The main git repository is available at https://salsa.debian.org/ftp-team/dak . Since git is a distributed version control system, everybody can contribute easily to dak. The development is coordinated via the debian-dak mailing list.

Summary

Overall, the Archive Team accepts responsibility for removing old packages and ensuring that the archive contains the correct packages in the correct place. While much of this work is automated, it still requires a large amount of vigilance, as well as effort to update the tools as the needs of the project change.

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Get involved

Delegation

The Archive Operations Team are DPL delegates (as per Debian Constitution ยง8). The actual delegation text is available.

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