Where did the idea come from?
Back in 2014 when we were developing the Gallium Nine, back then not yet merged code had to be shipped to the users somehow. These Ubuntu PPA repositories accepted our patches before they got into the Mesa3D and shipped them to users.
Sadly, Debian doesn't offer any PPA with similar coverage.
Why do we need nightly builds?
- verifying that issues got fixed before the release
- testing new features before Mesa3D gets released
- enjoying games at max FPS!
Where are we now?
The repository is autogenerated every night for Debian 13 (Trixie).
$ cat /etc/apt/sources.list.d/gfx-ci.list deb [trusted=yes] gitlab.freedesktop.org/gfx-ci/ci-deb-repo/-/raw/trixie trixie main
There are a few future challenges:
- let people know it exists (you don't have to compile Mesa3D on weak arm64 devkit)
- automated signing of releases
- integrate into Debian world (right now builds are produced by FDO GitLab)
If you want to help, feel free to contact me on Matrix, IRC, or LinkedIn.
Quirks and perks
One of the amazing features of this repository is versioning.
If you run software that regressed and you're not certain when it worked last time, you can browse the repository revisions and replace trixie with $git_hash of previous days and reinstall Mesa3D packages to figure out, when your stuff broke out.
Here it's my lightning talk about this topic on MiniDebConf in Cambridge: