Re: "Automatic" backports

[Gerfried Fuchs <rhonda@deb.at>]

   Hey, Mike (and rest :))

* Mike Hommey <mh@glandium.org> [2011-09-29 09:45:42 CEST]:
> I'm one of those people believing that packages that do grant a backport
> shouldn't require modification to do so. As such, all the packages I
> backport have no modifications in their source compared to the version
> in testing/unstable, besides the obvious debian/changelog change.

 A fair amount of my backports are in the same range.

> This means such packages could just automatically flow into backports.
> I must say it would make my life easier if it were the case ; I happen
> to regularly forget to push security updates to lenny-backports.

 If you would say "automatically be prepared for checking and send me a
ping" then I would be totally with you.  Triggers for
a.) when a backport update might be allowed to get in, and
b.) get a build for that done automatically right ahead, and
c.) just waiting for you to install it in your test environment
would be quite helpful indeed.  Part of my thoughts for my diffstats
pages that you can find at [1] is to extend it to prepare debdiff
extraction and get one along in that direction, though private time
constraints did hinder me follow through with that idea properly.

[1] <http://backports-master.debian.org/squeeze-backports/overview/>

 A quick start would be a cronjob along the lines of:

(w3m http://backports-master.debian.org/squeeze-backports/outdated/; \
w3m http://backports-master.debian.org/squeeze-backports/older/) | \
grep Hommey

 ... as notification part for a.) from above list, but actually it might
be possible to incorporate such notifications in the script generating
the pages, if people are interested -- though, the PTS does mail about
testing transition, so subscribing to the PTS for that part is
*definitely* encouraged for backporters as trigger.

 I'm willing to help with integrating such things directly on
backports-master, but having things automatically uploaded without
former possibility of testing is nothing that I really fancy to approve.

> PS: Please Cc me, I'm not subscribed.

 Thanks for the hint! :)

 Enjoy,
Rhonda
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