17 January 2022 - 2 mins read time
Tags: Outreachy Debian Technology

Hello again!

Been a minute! for this blog i will continue from my previous article where i explained Debci you can read more about it here.

In my previous article I mentioned Debci stands for Debian Continous Integration and it exist to make sure packages work currently after an update by testing all of the packages that have tests written in them to make sure it works and nothing is broken. For my internship, I am working on improving the user experience through the UI of the debci site making it easier to use.

Debci consist of the following major terms:

• Suite
• Architecture
• Packages
• Trigger

How it works together

There are three releases in the active maintenance which are Unstable, Testing, and stable(these are known as the suite). What do they mean? Unstable: This is where active development occurs and packages are initially uploaded. This distribution is always called sid. Testing: After packages undergone some degree of testing in unstable, they are installed into the testing directory. This directory contains packages that have not yet been accepted into the stable release but are on their way there. Stable: The stable distribution includes Debian’s most recent officially released distribution. The current stable release which is Debian 11 is codenamed Bullseye. Also we have the oldstable which is the previous stable release. The Debian 10 is now old stable which was codenamed Buster.

Architectures: These are known as the CPUs achitecture and there are various ports like amd64, arm64, i386 et.c.

An scenerio for example is if a user wants to test a package such as acorn in Testing on arm64 along with a package X from Unstable this would be a pin-package (Pin packages are packages that need to be obtained from a different suite than the main suite that selected.), which means the package the user wants to test with the initial Package selected.Finally, trigger can be described as the name of the test job which is optional. This test is done to check if those packages in unstable can be migrated to Testing.

This is a break down of Debci and I hope you enjoyed learning about what my internship entails. Till next time!

references: Debian releases. Ports