@mia @lanodan @navi @toast @whynothugo we do have debusine now; while at the moment it's still Debian developer-only it allows for a PPA-like distribution. I do hope it gains more traction and allows also non-contributors to publish their packages.

@navi @toast @lanodan @mia true. I feel there needs to be a some middle ground; personally, I dislike PPAs since they often contain low-quality packages. Debian packaging can get hard to right. That being said, there has been and is work to get some consistent workflows. I plan to hold a talk about that, too.

@lanodan
If you dig deep enough, there's always a binary that was used for bootstrapping that isn't available anymore.

How far you need to go for that is what matters, IMO. Debian's process for adding a new port to the archive is:
- someone builds the initial chroot using cross compilers or vendor binaries or something.
- these are used to start the port on ports.debian.net
@whynothugo @navi @mirabilos

@lanodan
- the build daemons churn away at building unstable constantly, both to prove that the hardware can keep up and that the toolchain is not riddled with bugs
- after a few years of this, the architecture is added to the official archive. packages from ports are used to build a minimal chroot
- the build system is configured to recompile those packages
- now they build the rest of unstable
@mirabilos @navi @whynothugo

@lanodan
End result is that you have several years worth of build logs on buildd.debian.org that you can go and audit, as well as binaries on snapshot.debian.org.

And also the core packages are all reproducible, so you can verify independently.
@mirabilos @navi @whynothugo

@icedquinn
And yet, since 2000, Debian has never had less than 6 ports, and for much of that time the counter was at 11.

Looks like it will be 8 for forky...
@whynothugo @lanodan @navi @mirabilos

@lanodan
From that page:

> from a minimal number of binary seeds

QED.
@whynothugo @mirabilos