[Librem-5-announce] Laniakea upgrade on PureOS repo/master server

[Matthias Klumpp]

Hello!

In order to greatly modernize our infrastructure, we will be upgrading
to a newer version of Laniakea[1], the tool that manages the PureOS
archive.
Previous versions of Laniakea were based on dak, the Debian Archive
Kit. This caused numerous inefficiencies and was a lot harder to
maintain compared to the new solution, where Laniakea has integrated
all archive management capabilities.

Upgrading will also allow us to iterate on PureOS a lot faster. The
new system has been tested for a while on a scratch instance and has
been running well, so we might switch in the following days on our
production instance. This weekend I will be running some tests and
kick off the migration in case no issues are found (and otherwise
revert and try again a week later).

During the upgrade time, software.pureos.net, master.pureos.net and
the upload service will not be available. After the upgrade, you will
need to adjust your dput.cf file to upload to the new location, since
we will be decommissioning FTP uploads as well (and make our security
people very happy in the process).

There are a few known issues with the new Laniakea version:
 * Laniakea implements the Debian Archive / APT repositories based on
the modern layout specification. Unfortunately we found out far too
late that debootstrap did not support the modern layout yet, so in
order to bootstrap PureOS, you will need to get our patched
debootstrap version:
https://repo.pureos.net/pureos/pool/main/d/debootstrap/
Alternatively you can also use mmdebstrap. APT itself and all other
tools can already understand the "new" archive layout for multiple
Debian releases.
 * Changelog files on the metadata server will initially not be
available until support for this feature is restored in Laniakea.
 * In the first days post-migration there might be issues with
receiving e-mails from the archive server - we will resolve those as
soon as possible. The Matrix bot will not be affected.

This update is extremely large and potentially very disruptive, so
please keep an eye out for any unusual issues and let me know about
them.

Cheers,
    Matthias

[1]: https://github.com/lkhq/laniakea