[Soc-coordination] Report 2 : Create Lintian reports frontend

[Abhishek Kumar]

This is the second report for my project : Create Lintian reports frontend
[0], mentored by Niels Thykier.

As I had already mentioned in my last report, I will be using pbuilder for
testing of harness. So, I spent some days in making myself comfortable with
using the tool.

I created a personal git repository at [1] for harness. I will be pushing
my code there soon.

After that, I started learning how the present harness script functions and
how it is being currently deployed at Debian. Neils told me about the cron
job at lintian.d.o which runs harness(-i) once a day.

I had initially planned to start writing a basic harness tool which is able
to take the input path to a .deb package and analyzes the package through
lintian and publishes the report. But later I had to change this approach
since harness is designed to work with a local mirror. So, my next task was
to set up a local debian mirror which I could use for personal testing of
harness. The task of setting up a debian mirror is not very complex and
step by step documentation is available for implementing the same. But, I
did not want to mirror the complete archive due to its huge size which will
lead to bandwidth wastage as well as wastage of time for harness to analyze
the entire archive. And since I suppose I will be running harness through
the archive a number of times during its development and the primary aim
for a local mirror would be just to check the sanity of harness, having
only a basic partial mirror should suffice.

Now setting up a partial debian mirror, with only a small number of
packages, was a task that proved out to be a bit complicated and not very
well documented since not many people have required it. So, while finding
the ways I came across the following tools :-

1. Apt-move : It is a tool for creating a debian package repository file
structure out of packages that have been downloaded to
/var/cache/apt/archives. Installed packages are downloaded there by apt for
installation. Apt-move will create this local repository in
/mirrors/debian, by default.

2. debpartial-mirror : It is a program to generate partial Debian packages
archives mirrors.

3. Reprepro : It is a tool to handle local repositories of debian packages.

Apart from the above mentioned tools, there were a couple of other webpages
- [2], [3] that I came across which talk about the task of setting up a
partial debian mirror.

I started with using apt-move, but due to some reason it did not seem to
work for me. I then tried debpartial-mirror and after making some changes
in its configuration file, I was able to successfully set up a basic
squeeze mirror that is perfect for my working.


--------------------Next Steps--------------------

1. Find out ways to implement other functionalities in harness.
2. Continue the development of harness.

------------------------------
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[0] :
http://wiki.debian.org/SummerOfCode2012/StudentApplications/AbhishekKumar
[1] : http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=users/abhi-guest/harness.git
[2] : http://people.debian.org/~debacle/mirror/
[3] : http://willem.engen.nl/debpartmirror/



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- Abhishek Kumar
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