Run Debian packaging tasks remotely with debusine.debian.net

Colin Watson <[email protected]> Thu, 7 Mar 2024 17:06:48 +0000
Newsgroups	gmane.linux.debian.devel.announce
Message-ID	<[email protected]>
Hello,

Debusine is a Free Software project developed by Freexian to manage
scheduling and distribution of Debian-related tasks to a network of
worker machines.  It was started some time back, but its development
pace has recently increased significantly thanks to funding from the
Sovereign Tech Fund.  You can read more about it here:

  https://freexian-team.pages.debian.net/debusine/

For more background, Enrico Zini and Carles Pina i Estany gave a talk on
Debusine in November 2023 at the mini-DebConf in Cambridge, which was
recorded and can be watched here:

  https://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2023/MiniDebConf-Cambridge/debusine.webm

With the completion of the first STF milestone
(https://salsa.debian.org/freexian-team/debusine/-/milestones/8), it is
now possible for Debian developers to execute many packaging tools
remotely (sbuild, autopkgtest, lintian, piuparts, blhc, mmdebstrap,
debos). Those tasks can be scheduled from a command line interface or
from the web interface (both making use of the REST API).

An instance of Debusine is now running at the following URL (with Salsa
SSO authentication, and running our Debian packages):

  https://debusine.debian.net/

While for the moment Debusine may seem like a less polished version of
Salsa CI, it has very different goals, and we are working towards those.
In the next milestone
(https://salsa.debian.org/freexian-team/debusine/-/milestones/9), which
is well underway, we aim to add archive-wide automation of QA tasks; and
we have three more planned milestones beyond that.  This is an early
preview to allow interested Debian developers to experiment and give us
feedback.

At this stage we have implemented some low-level plumbing to store
artifacts and run tasks. The UI isn't user-friendly yet, and automation
to construct a chain of related tasks is not yet there.  The funding we
are getting from Sovereign Tech Fund is aimed at building out a specific
set of features, so we are prioritizing these over usability for now.

We have a basic tutorial for how to get started, and you can find
debusine-client in unstable to use with this:

  https://freexian-team.pages.debian.net/debusine/tutorials/getting-started-with-debusine.html

Please give us feedback, positive and negative; we want to make this a
tool that Debian contributors use efficiently and pleasantly.  Now is
the perfect time to do so, as we're reaching the end of the design
phase. The best place to reach us is Salsa issues:

  https://salsa.debian.org/freexian-team/debusine/-/issues

While some developers are paid to implement the core features,
ultimately debusine is a Debian project, thus a free software project
where everybody is welcome to contribute. If you find papercuts, or if
you have a special requirement, don't hesitate to contribute:

  https://freexian-team.pages.debian.net/debusine/howtos/contribute.html

If you want to get started, you can find many small issues by looking up
issues with the "bitesize" label:

  https://salsa.debian.org/freexian-team/debusine/-/issues/?sort=created_date&state=opened&label_name%5B%5D=bitesize

Thanks,

-- 
Colin Watson (he/him)                              [[email protected]]
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