Hi, At the debian-edu meeting in Erkelenz this weekend there was a discussion about how to handle the skolelinux apt/package archive. This document aims to give a summary.
regards,
Holger
Participants
------------
Steffen Jöris
Werner Olsen
Andreas Stockholm
Petter Reinholdsen
Martin Zobel-Helas
Knut Irvin
Ragnar Wisloff
Holger Levsen
The issue has been discussed for a few month now, and the current archive
handling lack manpower. There has been no consensus on the software to use
yet,
so we tried to come up with a list of requirements for skolelinux.
Finnarne was unfortunatly not here (his flight was canceled), which is a bit
problematic, because he has done most of the archive work in skolelinux the
last years.
Finnarne has proposed reprepro, others have proposed the debian archive
software (dak). Martin Zobel-Helas (debian developer, not yet involved in
debian-edu) is familar with dak and offers help. Jörg Jaspert (ftp-assistant
in Debian) also offers support. Otavio also offered to help debian-edu with
dak.
Requirements
------------
Skolelinux aims to get all changes integrated into debian, hopefully an
archive will not be needed any more in the long term future. We need
something for now, as current archive maintainance in skolelinux is done
manually (and by one person only), it's difficult esp. for non-maintainers
to upload, as the documentation how to use it is out-of-date or well hidden.
* Feature: many maintainers who can keep it running for the next five years
(zobel, white, werner, h01ger are volunteering - we also hope for
finnarne ;)
This needs to happen from the beginning as forming a team later is more
work and sometimes gets forgotten...
* We need a strict policy for getting packages in the skolelinux archive -
because we dont want to become a fork of Debian.
* There are approximately 37 binary packages and 15 source packages in
skolelinux-sarge at the moment, but many suites: skolelinux-woody,
skolelinux-sarge, skolelinux-backports, skolelinux-sarge-testing, $whatever.
* Important FSF requirement: We need to have the sources available for at
least three years.
* We also want to automatically build CDs with debian-cd, to easily be
able to test new stuff.
* auto-accept packages in a testing-repository (from a list
of defined maintainers).
* dinstall needs to run much more often the on the debian hosts, so changes
to packages become visible more or less directly (can be run every time a
new package (version) enters the archive
!!! skolelinux needs this !!!
* fallback feature request: install the old version of a package (needs
keeping of old packages for some time, e.g. a month)
* nice to have: uploading one source, and build it for woody and sarge
-> wanna-build
(currently i386 only, nobody works on powerpc + amd64 (but the
infrastructure would be in place)
* nice to have: Policy Checking and autoinstallation of uploaded new
packages for quality assurance.
Other effects of using dak
--------------------------
* dak supports the same upload process and tools as uploading to debian
(just a different config for such tools)
* dak easily integrates with other (already existing) debian infrastructues
such as wanna-build and build-daemons.
* dak also makes it possible to have packages from skolelinux-$suite showing
up on packages.debian.org and packages.qa.debian.org with their versions
from skolelinux-$suite
* spread the knowledge about dak (debian archive software)
* If needed, every debian ftp-master can be asked when problems occur.
Additional ideas
------------------
* zobel offers to ask mirror-maintainers for more mirrors (at least one
should be there for redundancy)
* zobel suggested asking testing-security team to include the packages list
in their security tracking tool. (read as in: ask Florian Weimar to add
skolelinux to debsecan[1]). They track all security bugs with CVE IDs
(also the public known issues in stable).
How to proceed
--------------
* Discussion of this proposal on the mailinglist.
* No decission without finn-arne's input.
_IF_ we go for DAK:
-------------------
* setting up DAK would take half a day for zobel or Ganneff (with support
of the machine admin). zobel/Ganneff does not need super user privilges
for that, but it would help.
* needs root for "apt-get install dak postgresql; adduser katie ; #give
maintainers "sudo -u katie" rights.
* we need better documentation for dak, and a kickoff-tutorial for the
archive-maintainers immediatly after zobel set it up.
* build up Skolelinux gpg keyring (should be maintained by skolelinux
admins)
* Should be installed on the new machine!
(while/before/after skolelinux-sarge is released, zobel/Ganneff is not
involved in that :)
[1] http://idssi.enyo.de/tracker/ or "apt-get install debsecan"
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