Portal:Toolforge/Admin/Packaging

This page contains information on the various packaging situations we do related to Toolforge. This refers specifically to Debian packages (.deb).

packages

Approximate list of .deb packages we handle for Toolforge:

• tools-webservice https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/operations/software/tools-webservice
• jobutils
• TODO

sbuild

The sbuild tool is a simple and powerful tool to build debian packages.

Our packaging building hosts have sbuild ready to use. The first time you try to use sbuild you should add yourself to the sbuild unix group:

user@tools-package-builder-02:~$ sudo sbuild-adduser $LOGNAME
[..]
user@tools-package-builder-02:~$ newgrp sbuild

There should be environments to build packages for the most common distros: jessie, stretch, buster.

You can switch between them easily:

user@tools-package-builder-02:mypackage/$ sbuild -d jessie
[..]
user@tools-package-builder-02:mypackage/$ sbuild -d stretch
[..]
user@tools-package-builder-02:mypackage/$ sbuild -d buster
[..]

Sometimes the build-deps required to clean the source tree are not installed outside the chroot. To workardound this, use the --no-clean-source switch when calling sbuild. Adding extra repos and packages is super easy, check the --extra-repository option in the sbuild manpage.

Additional upstream documentation: https://wiki.debian.org/sbuild

old methods

TODO perhaps put here yuvi's method and bryan's method from Portal:Toolforge/Admin#Bd808's_method_(pdebuild).

wmcs-package-build

This is a script to automate most of the build & publish steps of the process.

See wmcs-package-build section in the admin scripts page.

For the toolsbeta project

Try first in the toolsbeta project for testing purposes before releasing in the tools project.

For that, build the package and upload it to the -toolsbeta variants of the aptly repos:

user@laptop:~$ wmcs-package-build.py --git-repo https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/operations/software/tools-webservice -a stretch-toolsbeta
[..]

Then you can install the package in toolsbeta servers for testing.

For the tools project

Once testing is done and you are confident with a given package version, you can just run the script again and have the package upload to the final destination:

user@laptop:~$ wmcs-package-build.py --git-repo https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/operations/software/tools-webservice -a stretch-tool
[..]

packaging good practices

Some good practices, advises and hints about our packaging workflows:

• use the sbuild tool to build the packages.
• when a new package is released (i.e, uploaded to a repository and/or distributed to clients) a git tag should be created in the git repository with the format debian/version.
• use the gbp dch tool to generate debian/changelog file. This reads the git log to generate changelog entries. Make changes to d/changelog in a separate commit.
• TODO.

See also

TODO.