sync-helper.py

[James Westby]

Hi,

Today I finished off something I have been meaning to do ever
since I became an archive-admin. Thanks go to StevenK for starting
sync-helper.py I just spent some time adding some things that I
thought were necessary.

This is a script that prompts you with each sync bug in turn and
then writes out the appropriate "sync" line to a file for mass-sync.py
to act on. This is a lot quicker than grabbing all the bug numbers
and then going through each bug in turn as suggested on the wiki page.

If you grab my branch from

  lp:~james-w/ubuntu-archive-tools/improved-sync-helper

and then run ./sync-helper.py /tmp/synclist you will see it in action.

The first thing it does is search for the sync queue and cache a bunch
of info about each bug. This will take some time so leave it running.

Once it is done you will see something like this:

499676: Sync python-fstab 1.4-1 (main) from Debian testing (main)
python-fstab | 1.4-0ubuntu1 |         lucid | source, all
python-fstab |      1.4-1 |       testing | source, all
python-fstab |      1.4-1 |      unstable | source, all
[Show/sKip/sYnc from unstable/switch to Testing/switch to
Experimental/Open bug]:

which shows you the bug number, title, package info for the current
Ubuntu series and all Debian series, and then a prompt of what to do
next:

  s) show the bug comments.
  k) skip this bug.
  y) sync this package from the currently selected series.
  t/u/e) switch to testing/unstable/experimental.
  o) open the bug page in your browser.

Hitting "s" will print the full bug description, then each comment
that was made, telling you who made it. In addition, if the commenter
could upload the package then they get "(*)" next to their name, so
you can tell if the request has been sponsored.

Once you can answered all the prompts you can run

  ./mass-sync.py < /tmp/synclist
  ./mass-sync.py --flush-syncs

to act on them.

I just processed 160 sync requests in 15 minutes or so with this. It
is easy enough to hit "s" and then "y", hitting "o" and "k" when
something doesn't look right.

If this looks good then we should merge it in to the main branch
per

  https://code.edge.launchpad.net/~james-w/ubuntu-archive-tools/improved-sync-helper/+merge/16779

I'm sure there are improvements we can make though, and there will be
some bugs.

Thanks,

James