PPAs

[Jono Bacon]

Hi Everyone,

A little while back I asked Allison about how I could be most helpful
to the ARB and she suggested I could help getting various improvements
made to MyApps to make the life of the ARB easier.

One of the items I am keen to follow up on was the PPA requirement.
Some time ago we had a discussion about requiring app developers to
submit their content for review in PPAs and I remember their being
broad consensus around this requirement. Unfortunately, MyApps does
not enforce this requirement and as such you folks are still bombarded
with tarballs which are often unworkable. As we discussed back then, I
suspect that requiring developers to provide a PPA with a package will
streamline the review process (and I suspect most developers could
grok how to submit a package to a PPA, in any case, I would ask dpm to
provide good documentation on developer.ubuntu.com for how to push a
package to a PPA).

In terms of how this functionality works in the app submission, my
feeling is that we ask the developer simply for the PPA URL (e.g.
ppa:my-app/releases). This would then provide the PPA details in the
MyApps queue for you folks to have access to. I recommend that we also
remove the upload button so this PPA requirement is properly enforced
and app devs are not temped to just upload a tarball. Does this sound
good to you folks?

I will have a conversation in Canonical about how much work would be
involved in this change and if we can get a commitment from the MyApps
team. I will also ensure we scope out work for dpm to ensure that
documentation is available on developer.ubuntu.com so that pushing to
a PPA is as simple and streamlined as possible for app devs.

Thanks,

    Jono

-- 
Jono Bacon
Ubuntu Community Manager
www.ubuntu.com / www.jonobacon.org
www.identi.ca/jonobacon www.twitter.com/jonobacon