Re: Debusine repositories now in beta
On Thu, Dec 18, 2025 at 03:43:08PM +0530, Utkarsh Gupta wrote:
On Wed, Dec 17, 2025 at 5:06 PM Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org> wrote:
When publishing packages to Debusine repositories, you can take
advantage of all Debusine's existing facilities, including a battery of
QA tests and regression tracking (coming soon).
Do you think we could add something for copyright checks, too?
Now, that's vague, and there's probably no deterministic way of
finding things, but even if the pipeline shows all the things it could
catch - perhaps using lrc or something - that'd be fantastic for the
maintainers. We could discuss the specifics later, but wondering if
you'd like to have something like that.
It's certainly an option. On the whole we would prefer not to get into
building our own tools for this sort of thing, but rather integrate ones
that already exist in Debian, but indeed maybe something like lrc would
be a good start.
I'd suggest that this would be a good thing for an interested
contributor to try their hand at. Anyone broadly familiar with Python
webapp development should be able to get their head around Debusine
pretty quickly; extensive reference documentation for all the building
blocks, complete type annotations, and a fairly fast test suite with
100% branch coverage make it a very pleasant project to develop in, and
we'd be more than happy to help people out.
[...] Repositories are signed
using per-repository keys held in Debusine's signing service, and
uploads to repositories are built against the current contents of that
repository as well as the corresponding base Debian release. All
repositories include automatic built-in snapshot capabilities.
Can I copy the package from the "PPA" to the archive? If not already,
d'you think that's something y'all can work on?
We haven't exposed a client command for copying between Debusine
repositories yet, but most of the server-side work is done so I expect
this will come quite soon.
https://salsa.debian.org/freexian-team/debusine/-/issues/1113
Copying from Debusine to the Debian archive is necessarily a matter of
calling dput rather than just being a copy operation in Debusine. We do
have a workflow already that can call dput, so it should just be a
matter of hooking up another client command.
https://salsa.debian.org/freexian-team/debusine/-/issues/1220
For the time being, I must admit I'm normally just reuploading the same
or a similar package to Debian that I've tested in Debusine, though.
Not ideal, but it works.
Who can use this service?
-------------------------
We've set up https://debusine.debian.net/ to allow using repositories.
All Debian Developers and Debian Maintainers can log in there and
publish packages to it. The resulting repositories are public by
default.
debusine.debian.net only allows packages with licences that allow
distribution by Debian, and it is intended primarily for work that could
reasonably end up in Debian; Freexian reserves the right to remove
repositories from it.
How d'you feel about extending this to cover various aspects of dak?
Or perhaps integrating with it? I'd like to see if we could
potentially use Debusine for NEW review - accept|reject|prod|etc. All
the existing checks & pipelines provided by Debusine could be pretty
exciting to plug into the dak ecosystem (ideally, just let Debusine
handle everything).
So, when I wrote the index generation code I did test timings against
the scale of data that dak needs to handle and found them to be more
than acceptable
(https://salsa.debian.org/freexian-team/debusine/-/merge_requests/1925#note_615536),
but of course there are many more wrinkles involved. There are things
like NEW queues, byhand, overrides, stable release handling, mirror
network integration, embargoed security handling, debug and d-i
subcomponents, cruft removal, release team integration, and all sorts of
other bits and pieces that have evolved over the years. I would
absolutely like to work in that sort of direction - if nothing else,
many of these things would be useful for Freexian's work on ELTS and for
potential customers - but I wouldn't want to put a timeline on it at the
moment.
If ftpmaster were interested in offloading some things to Debusine by
acting as a client, we'd certainly be happy to discuss that with them.
We had some related conversations at DebConf, but more on the DSA /
buildd end of things; we would certainly need a DSA-operated debian.org
instance, and on the buildd side we have some plans around scheduling
controls to enforce properties that would be needed such as "builds that
go into the Debian archive mustn't share hardware with less-trusted
tasks":
https://salsa.debian.org/freexian-team/debusine/-/issues/326
Debian infrastructure teams do tend to be understandably conservative
about adopting things that promise to improve their lives but aren't
quite there yet, though, and we don't want to make our success
conditional on that adoption. So for the meantime, we've been
preferring to fill gaps we see that aren't met so well by existing
infrastructure, in parallel with working our way through the stack of
things that we understand would be needed if teams do decide that
they're interested in replacing existing infrastructure.
Thanks,
--
Colin Watson (he/him) [cjwatson@debian.org]
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