Improving the distro packaging and installation experience

[James Westby]

On (05/12/06 16:45), Mark Shuttleworth wrote:
> Hi guys
> 
> For APT-based systems, we already have
> http://bazaar-vcs.org/packages/debs/ and I would like to understand if
> this is sufficient for Ubuntu AND Debian, and for multiple releases of
> those distros, or if we need to maintain current packages for the
> current stable versions of each of Ubuntu and Debian. For example, do we
> need a dapper, edgy, feisty, and sarge and etch, versions of the package?
> 
> Here's the challenge: come up with a way to build packages every day for
> all of those environments, so we shake out issues during the development
> cycle rather than at release time. I'm happy to fund this work if
> someone in the community thinks this is a problem best solved on a
> contract basis rather than an interesting volunteer project.
> 

So I have spent the weekend working on builddeb, and I now have some
features that make this really easy.

It can now export the upstream tarball from a bzr branch at build time
for you, and I will add auto-pull option as well this week.

It now also supports hooks, which allow arbitrary code to be run at
different points in the build.

This means that I now have a mirror of bzr.dev on my system, with a bzr
branch of the debian/. With a couple of hooks I just wrote and a crontab
entry it now builds daily snapshots of bzr.dev and uploads them to my
server.

  http://jameswestby.net/debian/bzr/

It's not perfect at the moment, they're not signed, they're built in an
unclean environment, and I had to turn off the testsuite run due to a
strange error I didn't have time to investigate. I'm going to try and
sort out these wrinkles in the next week.

Is anyone interested in this? It only takes a short while to set up the 
branch to do it from and a simple command in crontab to invoke it, so it
could be extended to building .debs of anything people care about.

I can't guarantee a .deb a day at the moment, but if we can get a sarge
backport of a recent bzr then I can improve it a lot. Probably including 
chroot builds for different distros.

Thanks,

James

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