Improving the distro packaging and installation experience

[Mark Shuttleworth]

Hi guys

I spent some quality time with the Bazaar web site over the weekend,
tweaking, polishing and cleaning up. It's a good site, well done to
everyone who has had a hand in shaping it. I think it leads people quite
effectively from the "intro" to the "try" stage.

I'd like to improve a couple of things, though, and the first of those
is the "get it" process.

For Windows, this is now pretty straightforward, though the fact that
there are two installers is an unnecessary (IMO) complication. I would
like to move the instructions for the Python-based Windows installer to
the from-source-installation page, any objections on that front? Is the
Python-based install a very popular option?

So this leaves us with the distro package situation.

Leaving aside Ubuntu, we basically have a situation where the Bazaar
team makes regular releases which of course can't easily be retrofitted
into many of the popular distro releases. I would like to propose that
we maintain our OWN packages (and hence repositories) for the major distros:

 - Ubuntu
 - Red Hat
 - SUSE
 - Debian

For APT-based systems, we already have
http://bazaar-vcs.org/packages/debs/ and I would like to understand if
this is sufficient for Ubuntu AND Debian, and for multiple releases of
those distros, or if we need to maintain current packages for the
current stable versions of each of Ubuntu and Debian. For example, do we
need a dapper, edgy, feisty, and sarge and etch, versions of the package?

Separately, I'd like to understand what we need to do to support Red
Hat, SUSE and other RPM-based distros better, across the Fedora as well
as RHEL and OpenSUSE as well as SLED platforms, with multiple releases.

Here's the challenge: come up with a way to build packages every day for
all of those environments, so we shake out issues during the development
cycle rather than at release time. I'm happy to fund this work if
someone in the community thinks this is a problem best solved on a
contract basis rather than an interesting volunteer project.

Last, there are a number of distros mentioned with very old version
numbers of Bazaar. Are those numbers correct, or are there newer
versions accessible in those distros?

Ultimately, I would like that someone landing on that page can
absolutely, unequivocally know how to download the latest version of
Bazaar and related tools for the supported platform set, and do so in
less than five minutes, following explicit, simple instructions on this
page. At the moment, it's a little hand-wavy, obvious only to experts.

Cheers!
Mark
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