[Repositories-devel] repositories.alioth.debian.org

[Mark Howard]

Hi,
  I've recently created the alioth project repositories. The aim of this
project is to provide staging areas and other repositories, without the
need for every project to learn how to use mini-dinstall, or whatever
they prefer. Also, I hope that a section of this project may one day
replace the experimental distribution. It will be split into sections so
that people only have to download the parts they are interested in
testing. This should lead to more people actually using experimental and
so sid becoming more stable and testing more like sid.

I am hoping to make this project a good alternative to both
custom repositories on people.d.o and also the use of experimental.

At the moment, I have some very rough scripts which process config files
for projects, produce simple web pages and run mini-dinstall to generate
a repository. I expect these will be completely replaced in time. I
chose mini-dinstall because it looked simple. Ideally, I would expect
dak would be the best scripts to use (if it's not, then why are we using
it for the main archive), however I wanted something working straight
away rather than spending time modifying this.

I'm writing to you because you all work on some of the tools which this
project may depend on. If you haven't guessed already, the project could
really do with help from you to make it a succes - therefore, I'm asking
for you comments and suggestions and even hopefully help in improving
the project. I'm sure I've missed some important people off the
recipients of this email; Please forward this to them.

The main development work I think needs doing for the project includes:
- checking gpg signatures. Ability to specify keyrings per repository
  (e.g. so some repositories can include NMs).
- Improving archive generation. AFAIK, mini-dinstall has a number of
  flaws, including not deleting old files. You probably all know more
  about this than me at the moment. Note: I chose mini-dinstall because
  it was the easiest thing I knew of at the time. The project is
  certainly not tied to it forever.
- Upload announcements, web pages showing new uploads for each project.
- Package browser for each project similar to packages.d.o
- Lint tests on new packages
- Require repository manager approval for NEW uploads. 
- (hard) Automatic building of packages.
...

If anybody has any comments, suggestions or indeed is willing to help
with this project, please send replies to 
repositories-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org
-- 
  .''`. Mark Howard
 : :' :
 `. `'  http://www.tildemh.com 
   `-   mh@debian.org | mh@tildemh.com | mh344@cam.ac.uk