Hi, At the debian-edu meeting in Erkelenz this weekend there was a discussion about how to handle the skolelinux apt/package archive. This document aims to give a summary. regards, Holger Participants ------------ Steffen Jöris Werner Olsen Andreas Stockholm Petter Reinholdsen Martin Zobel-Helas Knut Irvin Ragnar Wisloff Holger Levsen The issue has been discussed for a few month now, and the current archive handling lack manpower. There has been no consensus on the software to use yet, so we tried to come up with a list of requirements for skolelinux. Finnarne was unfortunatly not here (his flight was canceled), which is a bit problematic, because he has done most of the archive work in skolelinux the last years. Finnarne has proposed reprepro, others have proposed the debian archive software (dak). Martin Zobel-Helas (debian developer, not yet involved in debian-edu) is familar with dak and offers help. Jörg Jaspert (ftp-assistant in Debian) also offers support. Otavio also offered to help debian-edu with dak. Requirements ------------ Skolelinux aims to get all changes integrated into debian, hopefully an archive will not be needed any more in the long term future. We need something for now, as current archive maintainance in skolelinux is done manually (and by one person only), it's difficult esp. for non-maintainers to upload, as the documentation how to use it is out-of-date or well hidden. * Feature: many maintainers who can keep it running for the next five years (zobel, white, werner, h01ger are volunteering - we also hope for finnarne ;) This needs to happen from the beginning as forming a team later is more work and sometimes gets forgotten... * We need a strict policy for getting packages in the skolelinux archive - because we dont want to become a fork of Debian. * There are approximately 37 binary packages and 15 source packages in skolelinux-sarge at the moment, but many suites: skolelinux-woody, skolelinux-sarge, skolelinux-backports, skolelinux-sarge-testing, $whatever. * Important FSF requirement: We need to have the sources available for at least three years. * We also want to automatically build CDs with debian-cd, to easily be able to test new stuff. * auto-accept packages in a testing-repository (from a list of defined maintainers). * dinstall needs to run much more often the on the debian hosts, so changes to packages become visible more or less directly (can be run every time a new package (version) enters the archive !!! skolelinux needs this !!! * fallback feature request: install the old version of a package (needs keeping of old packages for some time, e.g. a month) * nice to have: uploading one source, and build it for woody and sarge -> wanna-build (currently i386 only, nobody works on powerpc + amd64 (but the infrastructure would be in place) * nice to have: Policy Checking and autoinstallation of uploaded new packages for quality assurance. Other effects of using dak -------------------------- * dak supports the same upload process and tools as uploading to debian (just a different config for such tools) * dak easily integrates with other (already existing) debian infrastructues such as wanna-build and build-daemons. * dak also makes it possible to have packages from skolelinux-$suite showing up on packages.debian.org and packages.qa.debian.org with their versions from skolelinux-$suite * spread the knowledge about dak (debian archive software) * If needed, every debian ftp-master can be asked when problems occur. Additional ideas ------------------ * zobel offers to ask mirror-maintainers for more mirrors (at least one should be there for redundancy) * zobel suggested asking testing-security team to include the packages list in their security tracking tool. (read as in: ask Florian Weimar to add skolelinux to debsecan[1]). They track all security bugs with CVE IDs (also the public known issues in stable). How to proceed -------------- * Discussion of this proposal on the mailinglist. * No decission without finn-arne's input. _IF_ we go for DAK: ------------------- * setting up DAK would take half a day for zobel or Ganneff (with support of the machine admin). zobel/Ganneff does not need super user privilges for that, but it would help. * needs root for "apt-get install dak postgresql; adduser katie ; #give maintainers "sudo -u katie" rights. * we need better documentation for dak, and a kickoff-tutorial for the archive-maintainers immediatly after zobel set it up. * build up Skolelinux gpg keyring (should be maintained by skolelinux admins) * Should be installed on the new machine! (while/before/after skolelinux-sarge is released, zobel/Ganneff is not involved in that :) [1] http://idssi.enyo.de/tracker/ or "apt-get install debsecan"
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