Enabling Fast Track archive to "federate" with other archives
Hi Dak maintainers,
"Debian Fast Track is a repository that allows making “backports” of
packages available to users of the stable distribution, if those
packages cannot be maintained in testing and backported in the usual
way. " https://wiki.debian.org/FastTrack
It is served using Dak.
There are some packages getting uploaded to fasttrack with Built-Using
fields that refer to packages not in fasttrack itself (but are present
in unstable, backports, etc).
As per a previous thread in this list
https://lists.debian.org/debian-dak/2019/11/msg00003.html "dak should
not rely on references to external archives which might no longer
provide source or binary packages that your distribution's overlay still
references." and I agree with this approach.
The same thread gives a solution using dak import that security archive
uses.
Nevertheless, we discussed a bit about this on this issue:
https://salsa.debian.org/fasttrack-team/support/-/issues/8 and I cannot
help but think that it would have been great if dak can resolve
Built-Using fields from different archives.
If I were to create a python wrapper similar to rmadison which is used
to query these different archives, and in _add_built_using in
daklib/archive.py use this wrapper to query other archives and raise an
error only if no such source is present in other archives either; would
that create problems down the line?
In this case, since the other archives are "trusted" (Debian's own
archives), I think the problem of these archives no longer provider
source or binary packages isn't really a concern.
Are there other issues? Perhaps software issues that dak might run into
if I implement this feature?
Akshay
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