Automatic Packages for Everything

Many packaging tasks can be automated, and are likely to succeed without any human intervention:

• creating a backport for Debian stable from a packaging in Debian testing
• upgrading a package to a newer upstream version
• packaging a simple Perl, Python or Ruby using one of the tools listed on AutomaticPackagingTools

However, doing those tasks still require Debian packaging knowledge.

As a step towards Debian's world domination, it would be great if we could automate those tasks and provide ready-to-use Debian packages, so that users are left with a deb-based alternative when there are no packages for their needs in Debian itself, instead of using upstream packages or building from source. The goal of this project is to experiment with the idea of a service that would distribute unofficial Debian packages for the above scenarios.

Typically, that service would deal with:

• determining which packages should be generated
• generating those packages
• using several methods to detect problems (e.g. piuparts, autopkgtest tests)
• publishing them