BIRD 2.0.8

[Jakub Ružička]

Hey Kees,

thanks for your kind words, I'm happy to help!

I've tired to contact Ondřej several times with varying degrees of
success - he seems very busy so I'm dropping him from CC. I haven't
contacted others, yet. I'll focus on taking over Debian package
maintenance as soon as bird-2.0.8 is available from upstream repos.

The repo you link is the official source of bird2 Debian packaging which
I forked from because I don't have control yet (I think) and also it's
Debian freeze so I'm not sure I should update debian/master as it can't
reach bullseye. I'll figure that  out eventually and let you know.

Finally, backports are on my mid-term TODO when I get more confident
with my Debian-fu. I'm not familiar with Fasttrack at all.

It's preferable to have up-to-date packages available directly from
downstream repos without the need to fiddle with external repos, but
that isn't always possible in reality and that's where upstream repos
come in.

BTW backports still require modifying system sources.list like adding
external repo - is it a big difference to use OBS (or any other
upstream) instead of debian backports one (for the time being)? 🤔


Cheers,
Jakub Ružička

On 4/9/21 9:23 AM, Kees Meijs | Nefos wrote:
> Hi Jakub,
>
> Nice, good job!
>
> Trying to prevent needless double work: are you in contact with Ondřej
> and Benjamin, or maybe others?
>
> And... how does your fork relate to
> https://salsa.debian.org/debian/bird2/ and other forks? I found other
> BIRD2 forks on Salsa, which surprises me a little.
>
> Lastly I still think it's a good idea to figure out if we could get
> BIRD2 in Backports (or maybe Fasttrack?).
>
> Regards,
> Kees
>
> On 09-04-2021 04:55, Jakub Ružička wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> I bring good news!
>>
>> I've been recently tasked with updating Debian and Ubuntu bird packages
>> and I'm probably going to maintain all bird packaging (including Debian
>> downstream) from now on as I do with Knot DNS and Knot Resolver packages
>> which were also previously maintained by Ondra Surý the current official
>> Debian bird package Maintainer. He agreed to pass the maintenance of
>> bird and bird2 Debian packages to me as well. Please note that I'm a
>> fresh Debian Maintainer, not a Debian Developer (yet?) so my powers are
>> slightly limited but I've been able to solve all Debian packaging tasks
>> so far with the kind help of my awesome sponsor and mentors and I intend
>> to do the same for bird.
>>
>> Debian unstable is in hard freeze and bird2 Debian package doesn't have
>> autopkgtests which means it can't be updated until Debian 11 Bullseye is
>> released.
>>
>> I've prepared bird2-2.0.8 on my Salsa fork and I also enabled Salsa CI
>> which is green (some harmless blhc warnings and reproducible build are
>> skipped):
>>
>> https://salsa.debian.org/jruzicka/bird2
>>
>> I'll make sure these changes will make it to Debian (and Ubuntu by
>> transition) eventually.
>>
>>
>> Regarding upstream packages, I initially intended to update the bird
>> launchpad you mentioned, but after a careful consideration I chose to
>> leverage openSUSE Build Service (OBS) instead to provide wider platform
>> support than just Ubuntu.
>>
>> OBS is already used in Knot Resolver and Knot DNS projects for packaging
>> and CI and while it has its share of problems, it currently provides
>> best value for building upstream packages on many different distros and
>> archs from shared packaging source.
>>
>> I already have bird2 packages built in a testing OBS repo for latest
>> Debian, Ubuntu, Fedoras, and CentOS but there are some remaining issues
>> with docs generation on older distro versions which I need to address.
>> In worst case scenario I will temporarily drop doc packages in order to
>> get bird built.
>>
>> I plan to announce the new OBS repos sometimes next week to provide
>> Debian, Ubuntu, and hopefully SUSE packages as opposed to Ubuntu only
>> through Launchpad.
>>
>> However, after seeing your interest in the Launchpad repo, I'll see if I
>> can get it updated as well to make the transition smoother.
>>
>>
>> I have bright plans for both upstream and downstream bird packaging but
>> I'll share the them only after I'm done with bird-2.0.8 packages you've
>> been waiting for.
>>
>>
>> Thank you for your patience!
>>
>>
>> Jakub Ružička
>> CZ.NIC packager 📦