Frank Küster wrote: > For some teTeX (or older TeXLive?) packages, I've used a > "sarge-backport" (or whatever the stable version was) target in > debian/rules. It added a changelog entry with backport version number, > and it switched some patches and build-deps (in particular, poppler > wasn't available in stable, and we resorted to build with the embedded > copy of xpdf code). On the VoIP team, we used to have, a while back, an automated backporting mechanism using build-server.net's infrastructure. Kilian Krause from the team was operating this for us, along with some other people, I think Bastian Blank among them.
We had (and there are still semi-maintained remaints) scripts under debian/backports/$DIST that performed the necessary steps to have something buildable in each distribution. These were mostly shell scripts calling sed on debian/control and the likes. We didn't try, however, to provide feature parity with testing/unstable; the scripts were allowed to disable a feature if e.g. the respective shared library was not available in stable. The feature was also (ab)used for Ubuntu-specific changes (where it wasn't possible otherwise) and/or backports. Going a bit off-topic here, the service also provided autobuilding for *each and every* commit done in the team's repository, for *all* distributions, including unstable. It prepared apt repositories for all of the packages/combinations and it was actually similar to what Ubuntu's PPA is providing now. All in all, it was a wonderful service and actually helped a lot with debugging because we were able to point users to a simple way to test a new version (whether it was stable or unstable users) and report back immediately if it fixed their bugs. It is obviously hard to scale on a project basis but I'd be extremely happy if it was revived even with limited functionality and/or a limited set of packages or teams. Regards, Faidon -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org