Make a website with information about -proposed

[broder]

We should have a website - something like http://debathena.mit.edu/proposed and possibly http://debathena.mit.edu/development that lists the packages currently in -proposed as well as the debdiffs between those packages and whatever is in production.

[broder]

Thanks to ezyang for doing a lot of work on this tonight. We now have http://debathena.mit.edu/package-list/, http://debathena.mit.edu/package-list/proposed and http://debathena.mit.edu/package-list/development.

I'll leave this ticket open until somebody writes my debdiff pony, though :)

[wdc]

I've looked at the "proposed" and "development" pages as they currently exist.
I have a couple questions:

1. How are these pages kept up to date? I hope there's a script that runs so they're actually always in sync with reality.

2. Is there a page that points at these two pages? I couldn't find links to them.

Some time ago, I suggested we needed documentation that explained what these two releases were. In email I sent on 15 March to a few folks I said:

I think it's very important that we be able to provide simple description
akin to jdreed's:

alpha = development, beta=proposed, and early machines get put in either
public or beta, depending on what their owners want.

Broder's email of 6 March to debathena subject header: "Apt repository layout" contains a LOT of good description. I'd really like to see some of that on the web site, and perhaps such a page would then link to the proposed and development package list sub-pages.

[broder]

There's a cron job that runs hourly.

Nothing points to those webpages now; my first priority was making them exist so that I could get a quick status view.

[jdreed]

I'll deal with the website side of things and write up a page pointing to those pages and link it from somewhere on the front page.

A new enhancement ticket should be opened for the debdiff pony, which should presumably be done by someone who has a better understanding of said pony than I do.

[jdreed]

I've added some prose to the "experimental features" page talking about -proposed. I did not mention -development, because I don't think we actually want anyone using that.

http://debathena.mit.edu/experimental#proposed

I'd vaguely like some sort of athinfo query that tells me whether a machine is in -proposed or not. I know I can look at package version numbers, but I'd like to be able to quickly look at a machine and figure out whether it's in -proposed. Clusterinfo will tell me for machines which are using clusterinfo, but we don't require clusterinfo in order to be able to use -proposed (nor should we).

[broder]

I think we're mostly there on this ticket. I'll open a separate ticket about automatically generated debdiffs between proposed and production, and Jon's documentation on /experimental looks good.

As for figuring out if a package is in proposed, geofft adding a new athinfo query ('policy') that will basically tell you the contents of /etc/sources.list{,.d/*}, although it's a bit long-winded. The change is in -proposed now. Is that good enough? If so, I think we can close this ticket.

[jdreed]

Having heard no objections, I'm closing it.