Re: PPA

[Raphael Hertzog <hertzog@debian.org>]

On Sun, 01 May 2011, Andreas Barth wrote:
> However, to get that done right for multiple software is not so easy.
> But please prove me wrong - as soon as 2. is done, I'm happy to help
> setting up autobuilding (even if that happens this afternoon). It
> needs however done in a way where buildds only pick up source packages
> from one place, and upload to one place, independend whether the
> source package is mozilla, ocaml, or something else.

Another aspect is that the PPA in question must be activated in the buildd
chroot so that build-dependencies can be solved in the PPA. Otherwise PPA
can't be used to prepare important transitions.

And you don't really want to mess up the build chroot, so it should really
use one of the sbuild/schroot method that throw away all changes after a
build.

> > I don't see why points 1-4
> > should be addressed by the project as a whole (and a prerequisite of 5):
> > each PPA maintainer can have its own tool / policy / proposals before
> > everyone agrees on something more unified.
> 
> Well yes, but how many autobuilding suites should we add? 50? 100?
> 200? How do we do key management so that we know that the autobuilder
> build the packages that they should?

How can we submit jobs to a buildd?

I don't know if we can need to invent a new file format but it would be
nice to be able to send a job to the buildd with all the required
parameters:
- target suite (oldstable/stable/testing/unstable)
- APT entry to add (i.e. URL of the PPA so that the buildd can fetch
  build-dependencies not satisfiable in the target suite)
- requested architectures
- URL where the resulting files needs to be uploaded (if needed, otherwise
  they could just be made available for a given amount of time)
- email to use for any notice (error in the upload, etc.)

For one-time builds, those job files could be signed by a DD key. For PPA,
we might want some sort of indirection, i.e. a keyring where DD can add
the key used by their PPA to submit buildd jobs.

Cheers,
-- 
Raphaël Hertzog ◈ Debian Developer

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