Thread: Hackathon news
Hi, before too much time has passed, let's get activity back to this mailing list. Dimitri, Magnus and I had some semi-secret meeting at my house, and worked out the blueprint for getting things flying. I'll just post our notes and my blog post here as well so people have a chance to catch up and don't have to dig into various places. https://github.com/dimitri/apt.postgresql.org/blob/master/hackaton-20120821.md ----------- # apt.postgresql.org hackathon The hackathon happened in Credativ place and Christoph Berg and included Magnus Hagander and Dimitri Fontaine. It took place 2012-08-21 and 22. That document is both a report of what we managed to do in the hackathon, including some decisions we took, and a TODO list for later. ## Hackathon goal We want to build all PostgreSQL stable releases for all supported debian and ubuntu distributions for i386 and amd64. We already have a Jenkins setup allowing us to manage a build queue, thanks to Christoph. ## Building pl/sh for squeeze We need to: 1. get our own postgresql-common package with the right supported-versions script 2. change the cowbuilder image source list to inclure our packages 3. build plsh in the build environment 4. get plsh packages for squeeze for all those PG versions 5. publish them in a debian repository in localhost ### postgresql-common Editing supported-versions is enough, `postgresql-server-dev-all` dependencies are taken from that at build time. ### apt preferences We want that the `~pgdg` packages take priority over the debian provided packages for the same versions, so we need to do some APT pinning magic here to make that happen, and include that setup in the repository and in the installation instructions. Default policy from the repository is a backports like policy. We also provide a package that install a `/etc/apt/preferences.d/apt.postgresql.org` file with the right pinning for a full pgdg experience: Package: * Pin: origin apt.postgresql.org Pin-Priority: 600 ### libpq We ship latest stable PostgreSQL version of libpq in all stable distributions (that's libpq from 9.1 for squeeze and wheezy), and we ship the latest-including-beta in sid (libpq from 9.2 nowadays). We need to build extensions with that libpq version too, of course. ### distributions and release policy We publish maintained PostgreSQL versions to current debian and ubuntu releases. We also publish old PostgreSQL versions to current and old debian and ubuntu versions. Distributions examples with wheezy: - wheezy-pgdg (only PG supported versions, 8.3 -> 9.1) - wheezy-pgdg-testing (including 9.2) - wheezy-pgdg-deprecated (including 8.1) Same thing with lenny, squeeze, jessy(?), sid, and ubuntu releases lucid, precise and some others. # Problems to solve later ## Automatic build Several sources are available for the packaging. We can either build from the current `apt-get source` packaging found in sid or from the source code repository on `alioth` (svn and git are in use over there). One idea is to build *testing* packages from their source code repositories and *production* package directely from the `sid` distribution. That means we're doing both Quality Assurance and Backports, but that might be a little too much for the first version of this build system. ## Build Images Optimisation It should be possible to provide for build images (pbuilder, cowbuilder) including PostgreSQL build dependancies and our own packages pre-installed. That means we need to rebuild those image at each PostgreSQL Minor release. We might need a Jenkins job to do that. ## apt.postgresql.org website We need some templates and build the website with them, or just use django here. The main installation instruction should go to the main PostgreSQL website. We agree that Magnus will do the django parts. ## Where to get the sources from The current Jenkins install is fetching package sources from `bzr`, `git` and `svn` repositories, we could do it the *backports* way and fetch debian sid sources instead with `apt-get source`. ## pg_buildext `debian/pgversions` should include a `*` facility so that we can build extensions against new PostgreSQL releases without any editing. Worst case it doesn't work and we report a bug. ## publishing policy Generally we want to only include packages that come from Debian unstable, usually in the version from there. Exceptions should be rare so we don't run out of sync and lose track. We need to publish a policy about Software Licences and content (postgresql, extensions, some special cases for clients, but not any client software). We only publish backend software with an OSI approved licence. # Build Environment ## Sources - PostgreSQL common packaging is on bzr http://anonscm.debian.org/bzr/pkg-postgresql/ - Debian Packaging for Extensions is on alioth SVN https://alioth.debian.org/scm/browser.php?group_id=30209 - Our own build infrastructure is on github https://github.com/dimitri/apt.postgresql.org ## Jenkins - we want the configuration in git if possible: SCM Sync configuration plugin ----------- http://www.df7cb.de/blog/2012/PostgreSQL_in_Debian_Hackathon.html ----------- Almost a year has passed since my talk at pgconf.eu 2011 in Amsterdam on <a href="http://www.postgresql.eu/events/schedule/pgconfeu2011/session/166-connecting-the-debian-and-postgresql-worlds/">Connecting theDebian and PostgreSQL worlds</a>, and unfortunately little has happened on that front, mostly due to my limited spare time between family and job. <a href="http://pgapt.debian.net/">pgapt.debian.net</a> is up and running, but got few updates and is lagging behind on PostgreSQL releases. Luckily, we got the project moving. <a href="http://tapoueh.org/blog/index.html">Dimitri Fontaine</a> and <a href="http://blog.hagander.net/">Magnus Hagander</a> suggested to do a face-to-face meeting, so we got together at my house for two days last week and discussed ideas, repository layouts, build scripts, and whatnot to get all of us aligned for pushing the project ahead. My <a href="http://www.credativ.de/">employer</a> sponsored my time off work for that. We almost finished moving the repository to postgresql.org infrastructure, barring some questions of how to hook the repository into the existing mirror infrastructure; this should get resolved this week. The build server running Jenkins is still located on my laptop, but moving this to a proper host will also happen really soon now. We are using <a href="http://michael-prokop.at/blog/">Mika Prokop</a>'s <a href="http://jenkins-debian-glue.org/">jenkins-debian-glue</a> scripts for driving the package build from Jenkins. The big plus point about Jenkins is that it makes executing jobs on different distributions and architectures in parallel much easier than a bunch of homemade shell scripts could get us with reasonable effort. Here's a list of random points we discussed: * We decided to go for "pgdg" in version numbers and distribution names, i.e. packages will have version numbers like 9.1.5-1.pgdg+1, with distributions wheezy-pgdg, squeeze-pgdg, and so on. * There will be Debian-testing-style distributions called like wheezy-pgdg-testing that packages go into for some time before they get promoted to the "live" distributions. * PostgreSQL versions out of support (8.2 and below) will not be removed from the repository, but will be moved to distributions called like wheezy-pgdg-deprecated. People will still be able to use them, but the naming should make it clear that they should really be upgrading. * We have a slightly modified (compared to Debian unstable) postgresql-common package that sets the "supported-versions" to all versions supported by the PostgreSQL project. That will make the postgresql-server-dev-all package pull in build-dependencies for all server versions, and make extension module packages compile for all of them automatically. (Provided they are using pg_buildext.) * There's no Ubuntu support in there yet, but that's mostly only a matter of adding more cowbuilder chroots to the build jobs. TBD soon. We really aim at using unmodified packages from Debian as much as possible, and in fact this project doesn't mean to replace Debian's PostgreSQL packaging work, but to extend it beyond the number of server versions (and Debian and Ubuntu versions covered) supported. The people behind the Debian and Ubuntu packages, and this repository are mostly the same, so we will claim that "our" packages will be the same quality as the "original" ones. Big thanks go to <a href="http://www.piware.de/">Martin Pitt</a> for maintaining the postgresql-common testsuite that really covers every aspect of running PostgreSQL servers on Debian/Ubuntu systems. Stay tuned for updates! :) [[!tag debian postgresql]] ----------- There is code for webpages using the postgresql.org template in there, but I haven't updated any content yet: https://github.com/dimitri/apt.postgresql.org/tree/master/web Some of it is already visible at pgapt.debian.net, but that needs more work. (And that's the old repo location I'm only syncing occasionally from the new one.) The jenkins scripts are here: https://github.com/dimitri/apt.postgresql.org/tree/master/jenkins generate-pgdg-source has grown the ability to put the various lib packages from the server sources (libpq5 and friends) into the right component in the archive, depending on the distribution targeted. There is a new "pgdg-buildenv" package that will speed up cowbuilder builds a bit: https://github.com/ChristophBerg/pgdg-buildenv I'm currently updating all postgresql-x.y packages to use a debian/ directory similar to what 9.1/9.2 have. (Maybe we can even have one that will work for all?) The bzr URLs have (mostly) changed to end in ...pgdg instead of the old ...sid-pgapt. The Jenkins build host is still running on my notebook, that's one of the next things I'm going to tackle. Christoph -- cb@df7cb.de | http://www.df7cb.de/
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Hello Christoph, thanks for the report! Christoph Berg [2012-09-06 13:33 +0200]: > We need to: > > 1. get our own postgresql-common package with the right supported-versions script We already discussed this briefly on IRC. This seems to be the only delta required, which is both tiny as well as bothersome as it won't ever go away. The difference between merging to new p-common releases and just pulling them unmodified into pgapt is considerable, so I think we should find a way to avoid this permanent delta. As you already plan to have a separate package which provides the apt pinning, could we not just use the same package to divert postgresql-client-common's /usr/share/postgresql-common/supported-versions script ? Or we change supported-versions to check if a file or script /usr/share/postgresql-common/supported-versions.local exists and return its contents/run it and return its output? > ### distributions and release policy > > We publish maintained PostgreSQL versions to current debian and ubuntu > releases. We also publish old PostgreSQL versions to current and old debian > and ubuntu versions. Do you plan to include running the p-common test suite in Jenkins, to ensure that there are no mis-builds or other things we haven't thought of (e. g. a p-common operation that does not work with 8.3)? > Several sources are available for the packaging. We can either build from > the current `apt-get source` packaging found in sid or from the source code > repository on `alioth` (svn and git are in use over there). The Debian PostgreSQL packages are in bzr. But I'd advise to only build from released versions. To avoid having to wait for the Debian archive processing, how about building packages from tags only, instead of from arbitrary revisions? Then jenkins could watch out for new tags, and immediately get going when it sees one, instead of having to wait for half a day for the Debian archive publisher. > One idea is to build *testing* packages from their source code repositories > and *production* package directely from the `sid` distribution. That means > we're doing both Quality Assurance and Backports, but that might be a little > too much for the first version of this build system. The testing one is interesting if we could combine it with p-common test suite runs (but that should happen for production packages as well). But yes, it's a matter of extra hardware resources. > ## publishing policy > > Generally we want to only include packages that come from Debian unstable, > usually in the version from there. Exceptions should be rare so we don't run > out of sync and lose track. Don't you also want to track experimental? That's where I put all the betas and RCs, as well as 9.2 right now while we are in release freeze. Thanks! Martin -- Martin Pitt | http://www.piware.de Ubuntu Developer (www.ubuntu.com) | Debian Developer (www.debian.org)
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Re: Martin Pitt 2012-09-07 <20120907063015.GD2625@piware.de> > > 1. get our own postgresql-common package with the right supported-versions script > > We already discussed this briefly on IRC. This seems to be the only > delta required, which is both tiny as well as bothersome as it won't > ever go away. The difference between merging to new p-common releases > and just pulling them unmodified into pgapt is considerable, so I > think we should find a way to avoid this permanent delta. > > As you already plan to have a separate package which provides the apt > pinning, could we not just use the same package to divert > postgresql-client-common's > /usr/share/postgresql-common/supported-versions script ? Or we change > supported-versions to check if a file or script > /usr/share/postgresql-common/supported-versions.local exists and > return its contents/run it and return its output? Afaict, there are two places where supported-versions really matters, that is at p-common build time (to determine which PG version postgresql.deb should depend on), and extension build time (to determine which PG versions to build extensions for). The case where the user is notified that he's running an out-of-date versions is not so important. I'm not aware of other situations where it is used. This seems to imply we could just make sure our build environments have the right s-v script, and maybe even ship an unmodified version to users, or go via some .local variant. We need a "pgdg-repository" package on user systems for several reasons: * ship the repository key (which I need to refresh soonish, it's going to expire in October) * possibly auto-add some /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pgdg.list file * add some /etc/apt/preferences.d/pgdg file (these two should probably be debconf questions) * Do the s-v tweaks mentioned above. I'll try to build some poc for that later. > > ### distributions and release policy > > > > We publish maintained PostgreSQL versions to current debian and ubuntu > > releases. We also publish old PostgreSQL versions to current and old debian > > and ubuntu versions. > > Do you plan to include running the p-common test suite in Jenkins, to > ensure that there are no mis-builds or other things we haven't thought > of (e. g. a p-common operation that does not work with 8.3)? That's already up and running, the build pipeline in Jenkins is: * the postgresql-x.y-source job produces postgresql_x.y-pgdgZZ+1.dsc where ZZ depends on the distribution (generate-pgdg-source) * the postgreqsql-x.y-binaries job compiles the sources for all distributions and architectures (build-and-provide-package) * then a common postgresql-testsuite job grabs the binaries from the last build and runs the testsuite for every distribution and architecture (postgresql-testsuite) * finally a common dput job uploads everything to the various *-pgdg-testing distributions in the archive. (dput-pgdg) If any of the first three fails, there will be no upload. The scripts mentioned in parentheses are available at https://github.com/dimitri/apt.postgresql.org/tree/master/jenkins https://github.com/mika/jenkins-debian-glue/tree/master/scripts The Jenkins setup will hopefully be publically visible soonish. I'll also write some more documentation on how the jobs need to be configured. The -source script does essentially only add a changelog entry to get the version numbers right. For the server packages (it is also used for extension and general packages), it will also move the lib packages (libpq5, libpq-dev, ...) to some other component in the archive, except for the current stable PG version (beta/rc in unstable). IOW, this means: postgresql-9.0's libpq will go to Section: 9.0/libs. postgresql-9.1's libpq will go to Section: libs (this is implicitely main/libs) for squeeze and wheezy, and to 9.1/libs for unstable postgresql-9.2's libpq will to to Section 9.2/libs for squeeze and wheezy, and to libs for unstable. That way, the most recent relevant libpq is always available in a distribution, but users can still install the others if they want to, then just need to change: deb http://... main to deb http://... main 8.3 8.4 9.2 This tweak was the reason why I put all those "sid-pgapt" branches on bzr.debian.org, but now this tweak is done on the fly. (Which looks surprisingly similar to the last patch Martin did on this ppa script. I didn't look there before, though :) As said in the last mail, the branches will be renamed to "pgdg" where they are still useful (9.0 and below, I don't want to change the trunk branch from the last version found in Debian), the others (9.1 and 9.2) will go away soon. > > Several sources are available for the packaging. We can either build from > > the current `apt-get source` packaging found in sid or from the source code > > repository on `alioth` (svn and git are in use over there). > > The Debian PostgreSQL packages are in bzr. But I'd advise to only > build from released versions. To avoid having to wait for the Debian > archive processing, how about building packages from tags only, > instead of from arbitrary revisions? Then jenkins could watch out for > new tags, and immediately get going when it sees one, instead of > having to wait for half a day for the Debian archive publisher. That's the plan, yes. Unfortunately, the Jenkins bzr plugin doesn't support that, but as builds are triggered manually at the moment, that will work too. We also experimented a bit with using "apt-get source" instead of pulling from some VCS. It should work equally well, except that this will need some waiting as you said. > > One idea is to build *testing* packages from their source code repositories > > and *production* package directely from the `sid` distribution. That means > > we're doing both Quality Assurance and Backports, but that might be a little > > too much for the first version of this build system. > > The testing one is interesting if we could combine it with p-common > test suite runs (but that should happen for production packages as > well). But yes, it's a matter of extra hardware resources. We were discussing this for quite some time, but the issue isn't really clear from the notes. The question was: do we pull extension packages from unstable, and put them in all our distributions, or do we pull the version from the corresponding Debian distribution? Even if we were only rebuilding the versions Debian already had way, we would still provide users more PG versions targetted. For example: Debian currently has: sid: plproxy 2.4-1 with binary plproxy-9.1 squeeze plproxy 2.1-1 with binary plproxy-8.4 Variant #1 would be sid-pgdg plproxy 2.4-1.pgdg+1 with binaries plproxy-{8.3,8.4,9.0,9.1,9.2} squeeze-pgdg plproxy 2.4-1.pgdg60+1 with binaries plproxy-{8.3,8.4,9.0,9.1} ^ Variant #2 would be sid-pgdg plproxy 2.4-1.pgdg+1 with binaries plproxy-{8.3,8.4,9.0,9.1,9.2} squeeze-pgdg plproxy 2.1-1.pgdg60+1 with binaries plproxy-{8.3,8.4,9.0,9.1} ^ Both have their advantages, and we could even do both at the same time. We then decided that this would be insanely complex to handle (and to use), and we would do #1 only. > > ## publishing policy > > > > Generally we want to only include packages that come from Debian unstable, > > usually in the version from there. Exceptions should be rare so we don't run > > out of sync and lose track. > > Don't you also want to track experimental? That's where I put all the > betas and RCs, as well as 9.2 right now while we are in release > freeze. The emphasis was on "from Debian". Experimental is of course also a good place to take things from, especially during the freeze. > Thanks! Thanks for the feedback! Christoph -- cb@df7cb.de | http://www.df7cb.de/
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Christoph Berg [2012-09-07 17:15 +0200]: > Afaict, there are two places where supported-versions really matters, > that is at p-common build time (to determine which PG version > postgresql.deb should depend on), and extension build time (to > determine which PG versions to build extensions for). The case where > the user is notified that he's running an out-of-date versions is not > so important. Don't we want to tell people if upstream support for a major version ceases, and thus apt.p.o. stops distributing packages for that major version? I think p-common ought to warn about this. I'm not aware of other situations where it is used. > > Do you plan to include running the p-common test suite in Jenkins, to > > ensure that there are no mis-builds or other things we haven't thought > > of (e. g. a p-common operation that does not work with 8.3)? > > That's already up and running, Splendid! > The -source script does essentially only add a changelog entry to get > the version numbers right. Not sure how much it overlaps, but for backports to my PPA I have this script: http://anonscm.debian.org/loggerhead/pkg-postgresql/postgresql-common/trunk/annotate/head:/debian/backport-ppa there's a couple of tweaks that one has to do to the packages to make them build properly in older releases. > For the server packages (it is also used for extension and general > packages), it will also move the lib packages (libpq5, libpq-dev, > ...) to some other component in the archive, except for the current > stable PG version (beta/rc in unstable). Yeah, disabling the libraries for older versions is one of the things my backport-ppa script does; you also need to fiddle with build deps (at least for the Launchpad builders). But if your setup gets along with the unmodified packages, so much the better of course. > This tweak was the reason why I put all those "sid-pgapt" branches on > bzr.debian.org, but now this tweak is done on the fly. (Which looks > surprisingly similar to the last patch Martin did on this ppa script. > I didn't look there before, though :) Ah, heh :-) Sorry that I didn't point it out before, I tend to forget about these details once they are properly scripted. > > The Debian PostgreSQL packages are in bzr. But I'd advise to only > > build from released versions. To avoid having to wait for the Debian > > archive processing, how about building packages from tags only, > > instead of from arbitrary revisions? Then jenkins could watch out for > > new tags, and immediately get going when it sees one, instead of > > having to wait for half a day for the Debian archive publisher. > > That's the plan, yes. Unfortunately, the Jenkins bzr plugin doesn't > support that, but as builds are triggered manually at the moment, that > will work too. I thought Jenkins supports triggering jobs based on file/URL watches? So you could put a watch on e. g. http://anonscm.debian.org/bzr/bzr/pkg-postgresql/postgresql-9.2/trunk/.bzr/branch/tags ? > We were discussing this for quite some time, but the issue isn't > really clear from the notes. The question was: do we pull extension > packages from unstable, and put them in all our distributions, or do > we pull the version from the corresponding Debian distribution? That's a tricky one, and we might need both. E. g. squeeze's version might support version 8.1 to 8.4, while wheezy's version supports 8.4 to 9.1, or similar. If extensions generally are backwards compatible as much as we need them, using the unstable packages seems right and preferrable. We definitively can't use the old packages only, as they often need porting for newer pg releases. Thanks, Martin -- Martin Pitt | http://www.piware.de Ubuntu Developer (www.ubuntu.com) | Debian Developer (www.debian.org)