Hi,

we had a short meeting this morning to discuss our Debian packaging and repository plans for WMF-developed software. The meeting notes are now posted at

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Packaging#Meeting_notes_2014-04-04

We agreed to set up a public repository at releases.wikimedia.org fairly soon. The goal with this public repository is to make it easy for engineers to release Debian packages to the general public without the thorough code review and manual upload needed for internal packages on apt.wikimedia.org. Automatic package builds and uploads will likely be triggered by adding a release tag in gerrit. The longer-term hope is to provide everything needed to make 'apt-get install mediawiki-full' install & configure a fully-featured MediaWiki environment including caching, Parsoid, PDF renderer and the kitchen sink.

For now the repository will only have a catch-all 'unstable' section that can be used for tested, but frequently released packages like Parsoid (in sync with deploys, typically twice per week). We have not made a decision on how to structure stable releases for unattended upgrades and security yet.

Generally there was a lot of support for keeping our Debian packaging pragmatic, without enforcing strict Debian guidelines to the letter in the first iteration of every new package. We'd like to work with Debian and have most of our packages eventually become official packages, but we also won't shy away from creating something like a mediawiki-full configuration meta-package that might not be acceptable in Debian itself.

Gabriel