platina-goes-release

This is the 2.2 release branch for Platina Go-ES. This release targets Debian 10 (Buster).

About this release

The release build is done in a controlled environment created in Dockerfile. This environment is used to ensure that we are building with the proper tools and libraries.

The file clone-github in this directory is a shell script which does git shallow clones of each of the build directories. You must edit this script to add new packages, and to change which branch (or tag) is used to build that package.

Downloading build artifacts

After pushing to a release branch, that release will be built. Each build produces artifacts, which are the Debian packages built, as well as a ZIP archive used for the BMC firmware and a CPIO archive for the goes-boot installer recovery image.

After a successful build, navigate to the Jenkins server on platina4, port 8080. Choose download artifacts, which will give you a ZIP file of all of the build products.

Using Aptly

There is an Aptly repository on platina4 in /home/kph/.aptly. The new release developer should make a copy of this and work with their own copy. Do not start with a fresh Aptly repository, as you will have to re-add all of the releases, which introduces the possiblity of breaking APT on our client systems if there are any packages which have the same name but different contents.

This build is presently referred in Aptly as buster-unstable. This was created in aptly by doing:

aptly repo create -distribution=buster -component=main platina-buster-unstable

Do not execute this command. I already did it. It'll probably give you an error. I at least hope it doesn't wipe what you have there.

Assuming you have downloaded the ZIP archive into an empty directory, the following command will add the new archive into the repository:

aptly repo add platina-buster-unstable *.deb

You will get some errors about duplicate packages. This means that the package version has not changed, but the contents have. This is normal and expected as not all of our packages follow the Debian rule of having nothing baked in from runtime, like C will do if the package uses such things as __DATE__ and __TIME__. Likewise, the Golang compiler bakes all kinds of stuff into the package based on date and time, so if the package has no changes, you can ignore the error.

Do not use Aptly's option to override package conflicts. This will break APT on all of our client machines. Yes, I did that once...

Aptly uses the concept of snapshots. A snapshot holds the package state of a repo at a given time.

aptly snapshot list

Will show you all of the current snapshots. These releases are based on version numbers like 2.2~alpha.XXX - find the latest XXX and use one more than that. Or switch to beta, or just versions like 2.2 for a release.

As of this writing, the latest published version is 2.2~alpha.6.

To create the next alpha snapshot, do:

aptly snapshot create platina-buster-unstable-2.2~alpha.7 from repo platina-buster-unstable

Once the new snapshot is created, unpublish what is there:

aptly publish drop buster-unstable

Publish the new snapshot:

aptly publish snapshot platina-buster-unstable-2.2~alpha.7

You will be asked to sign the release with your gpg key.

After you do this, use rsync to sync your ~/.aptly/public folder contents to [email protected]:/srv/goes/debian/.

Publishing BMC firmware

The BMC server firmware must be copied using scp to platina.io:

scp platina-mk1-bmc.zip [email protected]:/srv/goes/bmc/UNSTABLE/

Publishing APT source locations and GPG keys

The build produces a package for APT source locations, and for GPG keys used to sign those locations.

Debian packaging rules require APT source packages end with the string apt-source. Likewise GPG keyring packages end with the string archive-keyring.

If these packages change, you will need to update the versions at the top of the debian distribution on platina.io:/srv/goes/debian. The names of this are platina-apt-source_buster-unstable.deb and platina-archive-keyring-buster-unstable.deb.

Publishing new recovery versions of goes-boot

In the event that a goes-boot package can not be found on the sda or sdb devices in a MK1, the boot firmware goes-bootrom will fetch one from platina.io. This filename is baked into firmware (but can be overriden in the UI for testing), so generally this should be the stable release and not installed from unstable. There is no difference between the image here and the one installed to the boot partition, so this is generally not needed for testing.

However, to provide a new version, you must use scp and copy a new file into platina.io:/srv/goes/.

scp goes-boot-platina-mk1.cpio.xz [email protected]:/srv/goes/

Publishing a new root file system for the goes-boot installer

This is included here for completeness. The root file system is not built as part of a MK1 release. It is a seperate build in the buildroot project.

The install command downloads rootfs.cpio.xz from platina.io:/srv/goes. This is generated by buildroot and you should only need to change it if you want to pick up new busybox versions or update the debootstrap script used by the installer.