Apps Brancher

[Daniel Holbach]

Hello everybody,

in the last days, I have been working on a tool called apps-brancher.
What it does is simple. It goes through the relevant queues in myApps,
downloads the submission and imports it into a bzr branch if possible,
runs pkgme on it if necessary and pushes it to Launchpad.

After a few conversations it seemed like a good idea to have everything
in a canonical location, use one tool to get the source and exercise all
the tools we want to use in the future of app review.

I believe this should make it much easier to contribute to completing an
app by providing a few fixes and reviewing them together as a team,
particularly with a growing ARB contributors team.

You can see the log of the importer at
http://appbot.holba.ch/log/log.txt and get the code of it from
https://launchpad.net/apps-brancher

The current status of it is the following:

 - it untars .tar.gz and .tar submissions
 - imports source packages if it finds them
 - runs pkgme if necessary

This way we were able to sort out a number of issues in pkgme and
elsewhere, which is great. Also is it great to see that pkgme
successfully provides us with packaging for a number of apps, which
should be a great starting point for getting them included.

A few kinks have to be ironed though still:

 - 1008939: push branches to Launchpad
 - 1008942: write actions to RSS (it'd be great to have an RSS feed with
            newly imported apps or updated apps)
 - 1010830: Catch urllib errors, retry if necessary (sometimes we face
            timeouts and issues when the servers are down)
 - 1011532: bzr import of mixd.tv fails (bzr is unhappy with this 120M,
            ~1700 file import)
 - 1008997: Deal with .zip file submissions
 - 1008998: Deal with .deb file submissions
 - 1010527: Deal with text file submissions (it'd be awesome to parse
            PPA information)
 - 1011451: Deal with .jar file submissions


I hope you are as excited as I am about the possibilities of this
service and maybe one or the other of you is going to join me in making
this thing work perfectly and give us apps we can improve easily and get
included quickly.

If you have any questions, let me know.

Have a great day,
 Daniel

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