[csw-maintainers] New catalog: 'beanie'

[Maciej (Matchek) Bliziński]

Larger rebuilds have been historically difficult because we didn't
want to keep any catalog in a broken state. We tried different
workarounds, such as building on the test* hosts, but test* hosts are
intended only for installing and testing packages, and never for
building.

A new solution we'll be trying out, is a separate rebuild catalog,
with a set of own rebuild hosts. We will use the usual workflow of
building, uploading and installing. When the whole rebuild is ready,
and packages are working again, we'll integrate the changes back to
the unstable catalog.

You can upload packages to the beanie catalog the same way you can
upload to unstable, with the only difference being that you need to
specify which catalog release you're uploading to.

csw-upload-pkg --catalog-release beanie <file1.pkg.gz> [ ... ]

It is possible to run more than one rebuild project in beanie, as long
as these projects are independent. Ben and I are planning to perform
the Python 2.6 rebuild in beanie.

If you intend to use beanie, please first write to the list and
coordinate with others. Please do not upload to beanie just because
you can.

Rebuild projects in beanie should be limited in time. If your rebuild
takes a month, that's fine. But if it takes a year, it's too long.

I hope that this approach will make our rebuilds easier. When we
finish the Python release, I'll follow up with a summary of the
rebuild project.

Maciej