New year, new building system, and more transparency

As you may know, Trisquel is sovereign over its infrastructure. This means all of the services offered by Trisquel are managed by us, humans. We only rent the hardware and do everything else ourselves. Until now the git repositories were exported using gitweb and updated using shell accounts on the development box, but that has changed and we will be using gitlab for managing core repositories for the Trisquel project from now on.

These are exciting changes, specially the ability to allow developers to host their git repositories in the Trisquel infrastructure. Gitlab also allows for requesting merges of contributed code (also known as "pull requests" in the github world), so developers will be able to make changes, and ask for approval to the dungeon master.

The gitlab instance can be found at https://devel.trisquel.info and registration is open. You can now create an account, fork the code, hack, and request changes to be merged. You can check the development docs here.

But the exciting news have just started. Not only did we just get a new build machine, we also have a new building system to run in it, using Jenkins and relying in pbuilder, the standard tool for binary package building in both Debian and Ubuntu. This is possible because now, instead of using a big and complex bash script we have split the process in two steps:

• Create the Trisquel source package using the package-helper scripts
• Build binaries from Trisquel source packages using pbuilder

The first step is now easier than ever, and doesn't need root privileges. And with the second, we can assure the same environment for every package built, leading to less inconsistencies and more stable builds. We hope that those changes will give more visibilty to the day-to-day tasks currently done by Ruben, but also help leverage him from some of those tasks.

Happy hacking!