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