[Tails-dev] [RFC] Design of our freezable APT repository

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Author: intrigeri
Date:  
To: tails-dev
Subject: [Tails-dev] [RFC] Design of our freezable APT repository
Hi,

we (Cyril and I, working on our freezable APT repository) need
feedback about the design we came up with.

Who?
====

We need input from people who are into release management, and from
developers who are directly affected by Debian package management.
I'm mainly thinking of anonym and bertagaz here.

Other interested parties should of course feel free to have a look and
to let us know about any problem they find. I'm assuming an
intermediate level of understanding wrt. how Debian package
repositories work, and a good understanding of the Tails
release schedule.

When?
=====

I'm sorry we are asking for your feedback too late, so the timeline
for commenting is pretty short. Ideally we would need comments by
March 10, but if you need a couple more weeks (March 23), it can work
too. This is for fundamental design matters — for implementation
details, we can always iterate later :)

What?
=====

I'm trying to present things in the order I think you should go
through them. Whenever you stop after one of these steps, please send
feedback without waiting to go through the next ones — you can still
come back to it in more details later :)

On the [blueprint], you'll want to first read the "Assumptions" and
"The big picture" sections. A quick look at the "TODO" section
(optional) might avoid you wasting time looking for material that is
not ready yet.

Then, you'll want to look at the (very early) contributors doc changes
introduced by the [branch], to get an idea of how it will impact your
workflow:

  git diff \
     origin/testing...origin/feature/5926-freezable-APT-repository \
     -- wiki/src/contribute/


Note that not all of this is written yet; don't even assume that
placeholders for missing material are there.

Then, most of the subsections of "Special cases and implementation",
still on the [blueprint], may be of some interest to you. Some of them
are pretty much notes to ourselves, with a level of implementation
detail that will probably be too much for you: feel free to skip
paragraphs here and there, looking for stuff you actually
understand :)

[blueprint] https://tails.boum.org/blueprint/freezable_APT_repository/
[branch] feature/5926-freezable-APT-repository
[ticket] https://labs.riseup.net/code/issues/5926

Cheers,
--
intrigeri