elementary-dev-community team mailing list archive

["Sergey \"Shnatsel\" Davidoff" <sergey@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hey guys,

As you probably know, for OS patches we rely on Launchpad recipes and a
custom importer for Ubuntu packages to bzr branches because the official
imports are often horribly outdated.

Up to this point the importer required pristine Ubuntu installations to run
and only worked for the same distro series as the host, so e.g. if we
needed to import packages from precise we needed a precise machine, and a
separate machine or chroot for trusty.

After digging into apt configs and a day of coding I'm happy to announce
that it is no longer the case. We now have a single script that runs apt in
a sort of sandbox (look ma, no chroots!) and can import packages for any
number of distros, regardless of the host.

The code for the new importer and a changelog can be found at
lp:ubuntu-package-imports<https://code.launchpad.net/%7Eelementary-os/ubuntu-package-imports/apt-to-bzr-importer-2.0>.
I've updated the documentation on automated
tasks<https://docs.google.com/document/d/16bUZqrSudlVt7Z7gAafS15U-ZlmvhdSMpLEL1wcatGg/edit?usp=sharing>accordingly.

I've also been hacking away at our Apport (crash reporting) setup. The static
configuration<https://code.launchpad.net/~elementary-os/elementaryos/apport-retrace-sandbox>has
become unmaintainable at our scale so I've written a script that
automatically generates it given the names of the LP teams whose PPAs
should be included. That also happened to simplify the process for whoever
runs it.
The source code and a README can be found at
lp:~elementary-os/elementaryos/apport-retrace-elementary-wrapper<https://code.launchpad.net/%7Eelementary-os/elementaryos/apport-retrace-elementary-wrapper>;
the documentation on automated tasks is already updated.

I've also looked into retracing both i386 and amd64 (and hopefully armhf)
crashes on one machine without chroots or (omg!) VMs. Turns out Apport
supports it, but only for Ubuntu itself. I'm now in touch with Martin Pitt,
the awesome Apport (and PyGI!) developer, to figure out how to use that for
non-Ubuntu packages.

Thanks for reading!
-- 
Sergey "Shnatsel" Davidoff