[PKG-Openstack-devel] Improving the infra CI/CD for Deb packaging

[Thomas Goirand]

Ondrej,

I hope you don't mind even if you sent me a mail to me only: I'm
forwarding this to the list, so we can discuss it as a team. Hopefully,
we'll have improvements.

> I want to continue work on Swift and all dependencies of it. We already
> discussed why I don't like infra (over IRC). But to summarise it:

Let me reply point by point.

>  1. it's hard to understand for newcomers

There's been very few newcomers. For Debian people, indeed, it's harder,
but for people coming from the OpenStack world (which is the vast
majority of contributor), sending a CR is easy and a well known process.

>  2. it's slow to deploy anything

There's a lot of room for improvement. Without the sbuild setup at build
time, it shouldn't take more than 1 or 2 minutes to start building. I
already replied to Randal about it, please get in that thread.

>  3. it's always not possible to have one commit per change (i need to
>     git commit --amend after merge)

Could you expand on this? I don't understand why there's a problem, and
why one would need to do a --amend after merge.

>  4. it's hard to manage deb-auto-backports. It took me a day to fix
>     auto-backports just to upload new Swift version

True. Though it has the huge advantage that it keeps backports
up-to-date, which was never the case with the hack system of doing it by
hand. Also, you never had to take care of it, because *I* was doing it
by hand, sometimes cheating and just ignoring build problems (shame on
me). It was even more painful by hand...

>  5. it doesn't build packages for unstable - which is important, because
>     we are uploading to unstable and instead it builds/checks Jessie
>     backports (which is less important)

We could add that feature. Also, it is my view that one should attempt
an sbuild build on Sid before sending a CR. With the old system, we also
had the issue.

>  6. only cores can update package to new upstream version (merge commit)

So far, it hasn't been an issue. We can also have a very liberal policy
as to who's core if we do have a problem. Also, there's many ways to
configure ACLs, we could get them to allow everyone to do merge commits.

>  7. we still don't have one simple thing - ocata branches. Something I
>     can do myself in Alioth for less than 1 minute

As I wrote before, the Ocata branches aren't the problem. The reprepro
new Debian repo for Ocata is.

>     Anyway, I'd say you should first discuss this with Alison, and also that
>     you should give a list of package which you want to move so we know what
>     we're talking about.
> 
> 
> I will talk with Alison about this. If there will be someone who will
> manage (and fix!) infra, I don't have problem to keep it inside infra.

Cool.

Cheers,

Thomas Goirand (zigo)