[Debian-salsa-ci] folding (some of) branch2repo into pipeline

[Philip Hands]

Hi,

I'd quite like to get the bits of branch2repo that might be more widely
useful into the pipeline repo, but am not quite sure about how best to
do that, so thought I'd start a discussion rather than diving into
creating an MR which turns out not to be going in the preferred direction.

In case you're wondering what branch2repo is, see here:

  https://salsa.debian.org/installer-team/branch2repo/

The short version is that it assembles the artifacts from the build job
of multiple salsa repos into a aptly repo, such that one can test those
versions together.

So far I've been using this to enable me to generate test d-i ISOs,
which are able to download unreleased udebs/debs during the install from
the aptly repo created by branch2repo.

There's nothing udeb specific about that, so I imagine it could also be
used for e.g. testing various transitions before upload.

BTW At present there is an assumption that it is for udeb related sutf,
so it does things like disable tests that don't work well with udebs.

That's not really an essential part of branch2repo, so should be
separated out, so that the more general aspects of branch2repo could
then be offered as optional job in the normal pipeline.

Another thing that's very specific to its current usage is that it
triggers a job in debian-installer to build the mini-iso image.  That
should become optional/configurable.

It would be good to make that general-purpose enough so that other (as
yet unimagined) multi-project pipelines could be easily constructed.

Thoughts?

I'd expect that we could do this by moving some parts of branch2repo
into pipeline, then modifying branch2repo to use that instead of the
equivalent parts currently in branch2repo, and check that everything
still works.

Cheers, Phil.
-- 
|)|  Philip Hands  [+44 (0)20 8530 9560]  HANDS.COM Ltd.
|-|  http://www.hands.com/    http://ftp.uk.debian.org/
|(|  Hugo-Klemm-Strasse 34,   21075 Hamburg,    GERMANY
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