Automatic installability checking

I’ve just finished deploying automatic installability checking for Ubuntu’s development release, which is more or less equivalent to the way that uploads are promoted from Debian unstable to testing. See my ubuntu-devel post and my ubuntu-devel-announce post for details. This now means that we’ll be opening the archive for general development once glibc 2.16 packages are ready.

I’m very excited about this because it’s something I’ve wanted to do for a long, long time. In fact, back in 2004 when I had my very first telephone conversation with a certain spaceman about this crazy Debian-based project he wanted me to work on, I remember talking about Debian’s testing migration system and some ways I thought it could be improved. I don’t remember the details of that conversation any more and what I just deployed may well bear very little resemblance to it, but it should transform the extent to which our development release is continuously usable.

The next step is to hook in autopkgtest results. This will allow us to do a degree of automatic testing of reverse-dependencies when we upgrade low-level libraries.