Archive tools/reports for universe

[Sarah Hobbs]

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Hey all,

With our discussion earlier today about archive tools for universe, I
thought I might post to here, and get an indication of what people think
would be useful.

The rationale:  It's still quite difficult to figure out which parts of
universe need attention, so scripts automating this, and outputting
somewhere would be useful.  The more of this we can fix earlier in the
cycle, the less breakage there is, therefore we get more testers, and
get more feedback on universe, earlier in the development cycle.  We are
now past debian import freeze, so most packages for gutsy should be in
the archive by now.

What we might find useful:
(obviously, these would all run as cronjobs)

 * Running the cruft checker (this is already done, but is run manually
at the moment)

 * sync candidates between DebianImportFreeze and UpstreamVersionFreeze
   - Does this mean keeping MoM running?
   - MoM only covers merges, not syncs
   - Use multidistrotools?

 * Better bug search interface
   - Find more patches
   - Probably done within bughelper

 * Tracking removal candidates
   - Presumably this would be mostly binaries that aren't built by their
sources anymore.  See
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ArchiveAdministration#head-ef54afaa92dc55a2e7c4e39b7a7d1b996a099f8c
for more information.

 * Regression testing
   - We could run piuparts over entire archive.  Lucas did this for
feisty, and it took 6 days
   - Use debcheck instead.
   - Debcheck needs to be modified for Ubuntu.  The source is currently
in debian's qa cvs repository.  Any volunteers?
   - apt-cache unmet shows less information, and doesn't output as nicely.

I'm assuming that we will end up getting this stuff run in the Canonical
Data Centre, and get the results published somewhere on
people.ubuntu.com.  Obviously, using up people's bandwidth is bad, if
there's another way of doing it.

Obviously, we'd also need some documentation for all this stuff.

Your thoughts?  Opinions?

Hobbsee
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