[debian-lan-devel] Maintaining Debian LAN as a set of packages

[Afif Elghraoui]

Hello,

على الجمعـة 19 آب 2016 ‫02:14، كتب Andreas B. Mundt:
> On Thu, Aug 18, 2016 at 12:47:14AM -0700, Afif Elghraoui wrote:
>> على الثلاثاء 16 آب 2016 ‫09:38، كتب Andreas B. Mundt:
>>> On Fri, Aug 12, 2016 at 11:23:21PM -0700, Afif Elghraoui wrote:
>>>> على الجمعـة 12 آب 2016 ‫04:22، كتب Andreas B. Mundt:
>>>
> […]
>>> But that means, even for a minimal modification or a test, the package
>>> needs to be built again, right?
>>>
>>
>> Yes, that's true, but I think this is an advantage because even minimal
>> modifications can break things. The package build makes sure that
>> transformations apply successfully, and other checks could be made to
>> run during the build. In any case, package building is very quick since
>> there is nothing to compile. I'm planning to add a top-level makefile
>> with targets to build and upload packages, which can streamline this
>> process.
> 
> Perhaps it is possible to auto-generate the packages from the config
> space?  Like fast development, testing and fixing with FAI and then
> casting the final state into packages?

I'm not convinced that this will slow down development, though, since
only modified packages will need to be rebuilt. I'll see how it goes and
keep your suggestion in mind, though.

> 
>> Another bonus would be the ability to locally run something like debci
>> for the system configuration. I understand that autopkgtest supports
>> nested VMs now, so administrators might be able to do integration tests
>> of all of their Debian-LAN based configuration this way.
> 
> Something like that would be great!  Most of the time developing and
> keeping Debian-LAN up-to-date is preparing the VMs, running the
> installations and manually checking logs.  And last not least testing
> functionality.  Doing all that automatically would save a lot of
> time.  I had a glance at https://jenkins.debian.net on a DebConf a few
> years ago, but never followed up on it.
> 

This will also remain to be seen. The most involved part, of course,
will be actually writing the tests. :)

>> For anyone who wants to see, I'll be working with a set of
>> repositories under
>> <https://anonscm.debian.org/git/users/afif/debian-lan>. I have some more
>> stuff locally than what is currently there, but that is the expected
>> destination for all this work.
> 
> Great.  Of course/if it is more comfortable/useful we can also add the
> stuff to the existing Debian-LAN repository or next to it, depending
> on the technical relations between the modules/packages.
> 

Do you mean in collab-maint? While I don't mind sharing write-access, I
don't know if collab-maint is the best place, since these will not
eventually go into the archive for their lack of policy-compliance. I'd
be fine with putting them in the debian-lan team's alioth repository,
though.

There would be two main types of packages: metapackages (to define the
class profiles) and configuration modules. The closest thing to the
current debian-lan-config would be lan-faiserver-config, but the latter
would directly set up the FAI server rather than providing the sources
and instructions for doing so.

There is also the top-level repository I mentioned earlier that just
serves as the interface to the sysadmin/developer.

> OK, that sounds all very good.  I am looking forward to your work and
> ideas!
> 

In the meantime, I'm seeing that there are some changes to the current
debian-lan-config that would make things easier for me, so I may be
posting some patches here for review.


Many thanks and regards
Afif

-- 
Afif Elghraoui | عفيف الغراوي
http://afif.ghraoui.name