Incidentally, this article on Debian tooling reminded me of a CICD experiment I did a couple of years ago. I worked on a Debian-based product which had a three

Incidentally, this article on Debian tooling reminded me of a CICD experiment I did a couple of years ago. I worked on a Debian-based product which had a three stage Jenkins -> OBS (Debian packaging) -> OBS (images) CI pipeline that required modernization for various reasons. One option I submitted was to create a Jenkins plugin that exposed a Debian source repository as a multibranch pipeline, as a replacement for the second stage. The idea was to encode both a Debian source package's version and its binary build dependencies into the SCM revision seen by Jenkins. If either changed, Jenkins would've triggered a build automatically and if the binary package built was pushed back onto the source repository, the tree of dependent packages would be iteratively rebuilt. I made both a plugin prototype and a Jenkins test instance, using Aptly as a repository manager and a dead-simple Jenkinsfile as build instructions. It was quite an elegant setup that allowed one orchestrator to oversee all the stages of building that product, but it wasn't selected at the end due to too much uncertainty when compared to off-the-shelf solutions. Maybe I should write a blog article about it...