Debsources as a Platform
Channel: DebConf Videos
Date: 2017-12-03

by Matthieu Caneill
by Stefano Zacchiroli

At: DebConf15
https://summit.debconf.org/debconf15/meeting/254/debsources-as-a-platform/
https://debconf15.debconf.org/

Debsources provides Web access to all of Debian source code. Debsources allows to browse, search, and render Debian source code, as well as compute code metrics and statistics that encompass all available source packages.

This talk will emphasize new features being developed, mainly by two GSoC students and a former Outreachy intern.

On the one hand, Debsources is being extended to scale better, by switching the Debsources updater to an asynchronous architecture. This change allows to distribute indexing tasks over multiple workers, potentially running on multiple independent machines. It also allows to easily re-index previously indexed data in batch (e.g., upon changes to the available indexing plugins, or when injecting new releases from scratch), a use case that is challenging to support properly with the current synchronous architecture.

On the other hand, requests to extend Debsources with new features and to support new use cases, not always related to source code publishing, are on the raise. We want to address them by turning Debsources into a base software platform capable of running multiple Web applications on top of the same underlying database. The Debsources code base is being refactored to make this possible. As concrete use cases to test this change we are developing 2 new Web applications on top of Debsources: 1) a "copyright.debian.net" web app, allowing to browse, search, render, and export debian/copyright files; 2) a "patch tracker" web app to publish details about the source code differences that Debian packages carry with respect to upstream releases of the same software.

Room: Heidelberg
Scheduled start: 2015-08-18 17:00:00