Re: [Gnewsense-dev] Debderive

[Sam Geeraerts]

Karl Goetz wrote:
> hehe.
> Its a really simple thing to package, so its basically done.

Great.

> I do have some questions though:
> * would you like me to write a man page? will its command line options
>   change much from this point?

A man (or info) page should have been on the todo list. Good suggestion. 
You can take inspiration from the (incomplete) docs in the source.

It currently has no command line options. Maybe there will be a 
verbosity option in the future, but it's supposed to take most of its 
settings from the configuration file.

> * is it intended to be called from cron, or run as a daemon?

Cron.

> * what path(s) on the filesystem does it use, and where would i need to
>   change that?

Main configuration file is /etc/debderiver/debderiver.yaml, filter files 
go in /etc/debderiver/filters. The repository location is free to choose 
with the base_dir setting. A regular user is supposed to be able to run 
it, so perhaps in the future it should look for $HOME/.debderiver first.

> * does it have a configuration file for things like cache/temporary
>   paths? (or are they hard coded in the the script)

For gNewSense I plan to write a little shell script to run it with cron, 
so that it can update a staging repo which we move to a public location 
when it's done, plus a lock file for the whole run. It didn't seem right 
to implement all that in debderiver itself. Other than that, it just 
lets reprepro do its thing, meaning that what little cache space it uses 
is under base_dir.

> * I'm still mulling over the best place for the 'stuff' in the
>   debderiver.yaml. under /var makes sense, but a full debian mirror in
>   there? ...

I haven't thought about a default place for base_dir, because it's 
configurable. If it can be run by a regular user than even /home would 
do. There doesn't have to be an upstream mirror on disk, it can also get 
packages via HTTP or FTP. I guess /var would be the least bad place if 
you want a system-wide location on disk.