Re: feature request

[Gleb Arshinov <gleb.lists@pluron.com>]

Colin,

The metadata does make it very easy to build packages.  It is very
helpful.  But there are a few other steps involved in maintaining  apt
repository.  In short you need:

* infrastructure for building packages across multiple distributions
(e.g Debian Lenny, Debian Squeeze, Ubuntu Maverick, etc.), multiple
architectures (i386 and amd64 are a good start and can be done on one
64 bit machine) in clean sandboxes.  The preferred tool for this is
pbuilder.  If you want to build for non-intel architectures as well
you'll need something fancier like http://www.debian.org/devel/buildd/
* apt repository management - something that accepts source and
compiled packages, places them in correct places in hierarchy, prunes
old packages, generates and maintains required metadata and so on.
Reprepro is the preferred way.
* a way to expose the right parts of this repository through HTTP
* developer-side automation to package, and kick off the rest of the
system.  dput and and various debian development scripts are needed
here
* general understanding of how Debian release management works (e.g.
why you need to have different version numbers for different
distributions)

There are some crypto bits that go along with these steps.

We do this in-house for a bunch of packages including tarsnap.

I'd be happy to send you puppet recipes needed to setup above offlist
if you'd like.

For a single package using Ubuntu's Launchpad may be a reasonable
alternative.  The downside is that they don't actually build for
Debian's distributions (through in practice there is usually a
corresponding Ubuntu version you can use), and for an important server
service that's kind of ghetto.  You still need to do developer-side
automation and Debian release management on the client, but Launchpad
is a service that does first 3 things.

I'd love to see Tarsnap's official repository.  This is my #1
enhancement request. It's going to be significant amount of work for
you setup right, mostly learning, but should noticeably improve signup
conversion rates for Debian/Ubuntu users.   And customers will stay
more up-to-date with their tarsnap, which gotta be good for everybody.

Best regards,

Gleb

On Tue, Dec 13, 2011 at 1:31 AM, Colin Percival <cperciva@tarsnap.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> On 12/12/11 13:25, Michael Stevens wrote:
>> So I was thinking tarsnap would be so much easier if there was a debian
>> apt repository for it.
>>
>> Please can we have one? please please please :)
>
> I'm a FreeBSD guy so I'm a bit clueless (ok, a lot clueless) where Debian
> packaging is concerned.  I've got packaging metadata in the Tarsnap source
> tarballs (thanks to Mads Sulau Joergensen!) which I think should make it
> easy to build Debian packages.
>
> What would be involved here?  Google is finding me a bunch of documentation
> on "setting up an apt repository" but it's not immediately clear if those
> are the relevant instructions if I'm just trying to distribute a single
> application.
>
> --
> Colin Percival
> Security Officer, FreeBSD | freebsd.org | The power to serve
> Founder / author, Tarsnap | tarsnap.com | Online backups for the truly paranoid