Re: Auto-update for sid? Auto-backport?

[Guido Günther <agx@sigxcpu.org>]

Hi,
On Fri, Nov 17, 2017 at 04:31:43PM +0100, Guido Günther wrote:
> Hi,
> On Wed, Nov 15, 2017 at 04:43:17PM +0100, Steffen Möller wrote:
> > Hello,
> > 
> > my QA page or our blend's task page (like
> > https://blends.debian.org/med/tasks/bio-ngs) regularly informs me about
> > updates that should be performed to packages I alone maintain or (more
> > likely) with the help of my blend. The updates are often (but now
> > always, admittedly) easy to do.
> > 
> > I would really like to see updates performed in some automated fashion.
> > Maybe into a different section of Debian like sid-auto? The problem with
> > that obviously is the missing scrutiny by the human maintainer, so it
> > cannot go straight into sid. Or can it? Maybe with an auto-created bug
> > report against the package so it does not auto-migrate into testing?
> 
> What I have started to do is having jobs that run once a day uscan,
> rebase patches, build in pbuilder, run autopkgtests via pbuilder's
> autopkgtest hook[1] (to be put into a Jenkins instance).
> 
> That's about 99% of the busy work since I know in advance which packages
> will need work (because patches no longer apply, tests fail or lintian
> reports errors) while others can be uploaded right away after more
> manual testing (if they don't have excessive test suites). Would that
> help already? if so we could look into making this more usable to
> others.

I've cleaned stuff up a bit and moved some of the (smaller) jobs to a
public instance:

    http://autoff.sigxcpu.org

and dumped the ansible to setup jenkins and the jobs here:

    http://github.com/agx/debautoff
    http://github.com/agx/debautoff-projects

(Autopkgtests are currently disabled to not make the vm explode). If
this make sense for others as well it needs to be moved to a bigger
instance (maybe integrated with jenkins.debian.net)?

Cheers,
 -- Guido
 
> 
> > A similar situation I see with backports. Most commonly all that is
> > needed is a recompilation. Would an automation of that process be
> > acceptable? Would it be acceptable for packages that offer some means of
> > automated testing and are in backports already?
> > 
> > Many thanks for your opinions
> > 
> > Steffen
> > 
> 
> [1]: /usr/share/doc/git-buildpackage/examples/gbp-try-ff
>