Transition Tracker

This page describes how the transition tracker works, incl. how to set up a transition.

The underlying tool is called "ben" and the source is available from:

The setup on release.debian.org

The transition data is in www/transitions:

Adding a transition

When someone files a transition bug against release.debian.org, manually write a ben file (See "Sample ben files" below for examples). The ben file is added to config/planned/. Please note that the name of the ben file should be unique across all the config directories.

The transition will then appear after the next benup run, which can be done by a simple:

 ~release/www/transitions $ umask 0002 ; ./benup

Sample ben files

In the simple cases it will be something like:

title = "libnotify";
is_affected = .build-depends ~ /libnotify-dev/;
is_bad = .depends ~ /libnotify1/;
is_good = .depends ~ /libnotify4/;

A slightly more complex example have a look at the python 2.7 transition file in www/transitions/config. It is not pasted here, because the wiki does not present it very nicely.

Updating transition status

To change a transition from (e.g.) planned to ongoing, simple mv it from planned to ongoing and re-run benup (or wait for the cronjob).

To update the contents of a transition run either wait for the cronjob or manually run:

 ~release/www/transitions $ umask 0002 ; ./benup -u

Please note that it uses the Packages/Sources files from our mirror, so the data is currently always a dinstall behind the wanna-build stats. Hench if dinstall is disabled (e.g. during point releases), the command above is not going to be very useful.

There are plans to integrate the tracker with wanna-build and projectb to provide the site with hints of progress (or lack thereof) more often than dinstalls, but the final status will always be based on the Packages/Sources files, since that is what Britney uses for testing migration.