The Debian Janitor is an automated system that commits fixes for (minor) issues in Debian packages that can be fixed by software. It gradually started proposing merges in early December. The first set of changes sent out ran lintian-brush on sid packages maintained in Git. This post is part of a series about the progress of the Janitor.
The Janitor knows how to talk to different hosting platforms. For each hosting platform, it needs to support the platform- specific API for creating and managing merge proposals. For each hoster it also needs to have credentials.
At the moment, it supports the GitHub API, Launchpad API and GitLab API. Both GitHub and Launchpad have only a single instance; the GitLab instances it supports are gitlab.com and salsa.debian.org.
This provides coverage for the vast majority of Debian packages that can be accessed using Git. More than 75% of all packages are available on salsa - although in some cases, the Vcs-Git header has not yet been updated.
Of the other 25%, the majority either does not declare where it is hosted using a Vcs-* header (10.5%), or have not yet migrated from alioth to another hosting platform (9.7%). A further 2.3% are hosted somewhere on GitHub (2%), Launchpad (0.18%) or GitLab.com (0.15%), in many cases in the same repository as the upstream code.
The remaining 1.6% are hosted on many other hosts, primarily people’s personal servers (which usually don’t have an API for creating pull requests).
Outdated Vcs-* headers
It is possible that the 20% of packages that do not have a Vcs-* header or have a Vcs header that say there on alioth are actually hosted elsewhere. However, it is hard to know where they are until a version with an updated Vcs-Git header is uploaded.
The Janitor primarily relies on vcswatch to find the correct locations of repositories. vcswatch looks at Vcs-* headers but has its own heuristics as well. For about 2,000 packages (6%) that still have Vcs-* headers that point to alioth, vcswatch successfully finds their new home on salsa.
Merge Proposals by Hoster
These proportions are also visible in the number of pull requests created by the Janitor on various hosters. The vast majority so far has been created on Salsa.
| Hoster | Open | Merged & Applied | Closed |
| github.com | 92 | 168 | 5 |
| gitlab.com | 12 | 3 | 0 |
| code.launchpad.net | 24 | 51 | 1 |
| salsa.debian.org | 1,360 | 5,657 | 126 |
In this graph, “Open” means that the pull request has been created but likely nobody has looked at it yet. Merged means that the pull request has been marked as merged on the hoster, and applied means that the changes have ended up in the packaging branch but via a different route (e.g. cherry-picked or manually applied). Closed means that the pull request was closed without the changes being incorporated.
Note that this excludes ~5,600 direct pushes, all of which were to salsa-hosted repositories.
See also:
- Historical graphs on trends.debian.net with number of packages per VCS and per hoster (purely based on Vcs-* headers in the archive, with no heuristics applied)
- Zack’s table of number of Vcs-* header by system (Git, Svn, etc)
- current Janitor merge proposal statistics
For more information about the Janitor’s lintian-fixes efforts, see the landing page.