test the debian upgrades in jenkins

I don't actually know how to do this, to be real clear here. :)

You seem to have a great idea. We could have a "stable to testing" test, or "stable to unstable".

The problem with that is it can't test 1.0 to 1.5, for example, but maybe that's a good start already.

The one thing i was thinking about is that we can generate debian packages on the fly and install them directly... But i'm not sure how this plays with the cloud...

We *could* keep all old packages though, by running reprepro with --keepunreferenced. The problem though is that apt-get is not going to find those files - apt repositories can only reference a single version per release. So we would need to wget the file manually, which defeats the whole purpose of having an APT repo in the first place... might as well build the package by hand and upload it into the vserver.

We do have multiple releases: stable, testing, unstable. So what Steve proposed for that is fine.

The issue is that we want this job to be able to test arbitrary release upgrades. Which necessarily means (A) rebuilding 2 packages from tags (not a problem) and then (B) installing the first package and upgrading to the second package in a vserver (that's the part i am not confortable with).

If someone can give me a script that would do (B), I can do (A).

That's cool!

Now we need a script that would do something similar but instead of taking "stable" and "testing", would take .debs.

The hairy part there is probably that apt-get can't deal directly with .debs. The way "pbuilder" does this is using those two commands:

    $CHROOTEXEC dpkg --force-depends --force-conflicts -i "$BUILD_DEP_DEB_DIR/pbuilder-satisfydepends-dummy.deb" || true
    $CHROOTEXEC aptitude -y --without-recommends -o APT::Install-Recommends=false "${PBUILDER_APTITUDE_CHECK_OPTS[@]}" -o Aptitude::ProblemResolver::StepScore=100 -o "Aptitude::ProblemResolver::Hints::KeepDummy=reject pbuilder-satisfydepends-dummy :UNINST" -o Aptitude::ProblemResolver::Keep-All-Level=55000 -o Aptitude::ProblemResolver::Remove-Essential-Level=maximum install pbuilder-satisfydepends-dummy

Here pbuilder-satisfydepends-dummy.deb would be aegir.deb, aegir-hostmaster.deb and aegir-provision.deb...