Discussing on #salsaci, it came up the idea of triggering autopkgtest
jobs on ci.d.n workers from the salsa ci pipeline. This has the
advantage of reproducing the same reference autopkgtest environment.
However, when binary packages are not available (yet), debci should
force building them. This would be especially the case of architecture
that don't have a gitlab runner available.

Cheers!

  - S

Hi,

For completeness sake, I think we only need this option for
architectures unsupported by salsaci. For the current architectures,
what I had/have in mind (and what works already on the ci.d.n side of
things) is that salsaci sets up an archive that's added to the testbed,
like we already do with php, ocaml, perl and ruby test archives [1]. The
freshly build binaries would get installed from that archive

Paul

[1]
https://salsa.debian.org/ci-team/debian-ci-config/-/blob/master/cookbooks/debci/templates/extra_apt_sources_list.yaml.erb?ref_type=heads#L122

I don't think that would work, because such archive would need to be
specific to each pipeline.

Also, we would need some authentication before building/testing a
package: we don't want to run untrusted packages from anyone with a
salsa account. In the way ci.debian.net works today, the packages we
test were signed by someone with upload permissions to the Debian
archive.