[Soc-coordination] Report #2 - Automated Multi-Arch Cross-Building and Bootstrapping

[Gustavo Alkmim]

Project: Automated Multi-Arch Cross-Building and Bootstrapping
Report #2 - Jun 6th to Jun 20

The main objective of the project is to produce a tool to sequence the
bootstrapping of a Debian system. This tool should be able to bootstrap any
architecture (armel, mips, amd64, etc) of the repository. The main problem
is to break the cyclic dependencies of important bootstrap packages.

The report #1 may be found on [0].
The description of the project may be found on [1].

######## 1) What I have done since the begining

Here I'm just going to summing up the main things I have done since the
begining of the GSoC:

--- Got introduced to the involved persons of the community,
--- Read the documentation related with the project
--- Defined the main objective of the project
--- Finished a bash script to automate the process of find cycles and
determines the build order of non-cyclic packages

######## 2) What I have done in the past two weeks

--- I used the deboostrap command to generate a list of a base debian
system. With this list I did some tests with my bash script to find the
cycles i should break. In a conversation with Wookey, we decided that use
the package list generated by the debootstrap command as a reference of
which packages we should work on is interesting.

--- The bash script uses xdeb [2] to find the cycles. I was having some
problems because xdeb normally search for source it e packages instead of
binary package. To solve this problem Wookey told me to use the xdeb
provided in [3] that are able to search for  binary packages too. It is
important to also search for binary packages because debootstrap gives a
list that include binary packages.

--- The bash script was producing a very big graph because it generates a
graph including all packages the are involved in the dependencies of a given
package. The solution we found was to generate the strong conected graph. In
this way just the packages involved on the cycles are going to appears on
the graph. This step is still under development.

######## 3) Next steps

--- Improve the gen-dep-graph.sh so it can download the sources of the
packages
--- Break all cycles of the list produced by debootstrap

######## 4) References
[0]
http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/soc-coordination/2011-June/001007.html
[1]
http://wiki.debian.org/SummerOfCode2011/AutomatedBootstrapping/GustavoAlkmim
[2] https://code.launchpad.net/~wookey/xdeb/
[3] https://code.launchpad.net/~wookey/xdeb/allowbinaries


Cheers,

Gustavo Prado Alkmim
Master Student at Unicamp/Brazil
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