The autobuilder is definitely not a replacement for apt-src. It is designed to allow a team of people to maintain one or more debian repositories. It has features like:

1. the list of packages to be built can be checked into a shared repository
2. ability to build packages that are stored in many different ways: tla, hg, darcs, tarballs, quilt-patches, Debian source repositories, svn, and more
3. system/tools for uploading packages to a package server and installing them into a debian repository
4. detect when packages need to be rebuilt due to build dependency changes or changes to the source.
5. works with Debian and Ubuntu
6. packages are built in a clean chroot that is based on what dist the package is being built for
7. and more…

So, it could be the right tool for maintaining a binary distribution, but it is definitely fills a different niche than apt-src.

Similar to what happened with the cabal-debian stuff, the autobuilder will need to go through a few iterations of cleanup before it is suitable for general purpose use. The biggest stumbling block is that there is very little documentation on how to use it or what the big picture looks like. While it is not hard to use, we have had the luxury of newcomers starting with a working configuration and having easy access to hands on training.

I’ll see if I can get the latest cabal-debian and autobuilder up on hackage tomorrow as a starting point.

Let me know when that version makes onto Hackage, I’ll be interested in checking it out. The changelog comment is simply related to the --update-debianization argument you can pass to cabal-debian. In my mind it won’t be necessary to update the quick-and-dirty source packages. cabal-debian simply does more than what is needed for what I hope to do.

So you are saying that I should take a look at autobuilder rather than spend more time on apt-src? What you say sounds very good.

When will autobuilder be available on Hackage?

IMO, if you can create a repository of source debs that actually build, it should not be too hard to also create a binary repository using the autobuilder (http://src.seereason.com/ghc610/autobuilder/). The autobuilder can already download individual source debs from a repository and build them. It would be trivial to download the Sources index and automatically create targets for all the source packages on-the-fly. (the haskell-debian library already provides all the functions for fetching and parsing Sources files). The autobuilder already knows how to track build-dependencies and rebuild packages when build-dependencies change.

I guess the take away is that you shouldn’t have to do anything special to support the autobuilder. Simply creating a working source deb repo should be enough…