Design goals

A few things to keep in mind as you work on debusine’s design.

Cloud friendly

The Debian archive is huge, any task processing the Debian archive is going to take a lot of computer power and can generate huge amounts of data.

To cope with this, the system must be able to scale by leveraging the cloud, both to have additional workers and to store the generated artifacts.

At the same time, using a cloud service should not be required, one should be able to supply “static” workers. Debian will likely want dedicated trusted workers for the build of official packages.

Vendor neutral

Debusine is built for Debian but it should be usable by Debian derivatives and anyone who wants to build Debian packages. It should be easy to configure and be available as an official Debian package.

Easy to extend

New workflows and new ideas will continue to pop up in the Debian community and it should be easy to extend debusine to implement and try out those new workflows.

Permissions

Among the expected workflows, there will be the security team that will want to run checks on embargoed updates, so the system should have some way to work on private data and respect that privacy.

Uploads are also restricted to some limited group of users, and many of the workflows will want to restrict some actions, so the system must have some authentication and authorization mechanism.