DogfoodingLucille

DogfoodingLucille

Status

Introduction

This specification discusses the process and implications of dogfooding the Canonical archive publisher for Launchpad, which is informally known as Lucille. The term 'dogfood', in this instance, refers to the process of using the archive publisher on an internal Canonical machine for the purpose of determining whether or not the publisher is ready to enter production. Dogfooding is done with non-live but still accurate data (often imported, periodically from either production or other sources). The term 'dogfooding' also implies that we will be using the results of the archive publisher in order to "eat our own dogfood".

Rationale

In order to be sure that the archive publisher is working properly we need to give it a long term test. The only way we can be certain is to force ourselves to rely on it working properly. Dogfooding lets us do this without forcing the rest of the world to cope when we haven't got it quite right yet.

Implementation Plan

  • Use Gina to import warty, warty-updates, warty-security, hoary, hoary-updates, hoary-security and breezy into dogfood. We may use Gina to import grumpy, but this will be decided later.
  • Use the Canonical Archive Publisher to then publish the Ubuntu distribution in order to test the publisher.
  • Do this regularly (every day, hour, 30m, whatever).
  • After breezy's feature freeze, three months before the breezy release, encourage launchpadders to upgrade from hoary to breezy, and to use the dogfood generated archive instead of archive.ubuntu.com in their apt sources.

Outstanding Issues

  • The Canonical archive publisher needs to be mostly finished before the dogfooding can begin.

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UbuntuDownUnder/BOFs/DogfoodingLucille (last edited 2008-08-06 16:13:53 by localhost)