No bazaar 2.1.0b1 release in beta paa

[Martin Pool]

2009/11/3 John Ferlito <johnf at inodes.org>:
> On Fri, Oct 30, 2009 at 08:54:53AM -0500, John Arbash Meinel wrote:
>> I'm including 'johnf' who was doing our ppa uploads. I'm not sure if he
>> saw our mailing list discussions about how we were planning on dividing
>> up the ppa.
>
> I've been a bit time poor lately so at the time I uploaded 2.0.1 and
> hoped I'd get to the beta later.
>
> I'll try and do it in the next few days.
>
> Although I should raise a problem I see with the proposed process.
>
> One of the reasons I took on the PPA work is that I was fed up with
> the PPA never being quite in sync. e.g. you would upgrade and the
> bzr-svn version was out of date so it would break dependencies.
>
> One thing I have tried very hard to accomplish is to make sure both
> PPAs are always in sync. ie even in the beta PPA I've been hesitant to
> upload an rc release until bzrtools and bzr-svn supported it. I
> hassled respective maintainers where necessary.
>
> I don't think this is going to be possible for beta releases. So is
> everyone happy to have broken dependencies in the beta PPA?

Thanks for raising that; there are a few interesting points there.
And of course thanks for all the packaging you've done to date.

Previously, we had the beta ppa as a place to upload packages that
might be out of sync.  So while ~bzr-beta-ppa might not be installable
by itself, with the two of them together you should be able to install
either the just-released or the previous version.

But now we have a bit of a gap that there's nowhere that packages the
rcs of stable releases.  We could add another ppa for that, though
this might get a bit laborious.

There is a bug open that ppas should retain old versions of packages
for some window, which would let apt install the latest consistent
versions of the packages.  But I haven't heard of it being fixed yet
and I'm guessing it's a lower priority than daily builds.  We could
work around this by copying all the packages into a separately
maintained archive that does keep all previous versions, which would
be useful in its own right.

Given all the attention on Ubuntu-distributed-devel towards bzr
builder and builddeb, maybe we should unify the packaging onto those
tools, if it's not already.

I started on a script that checked the relative consistency of each of
the ppas.  I should finish that off.

I think the ideal would be that packages are uploaded as soon as
possibly after the release, but that there's also a ppa that holds a
consistent set.  Possibly we could have a bot that waits for a staging
ppa to get to a consistent state, and then copies everything into the
ppa people are actually meant to use?

-- 
Martin <http://launchpad.net/~mbp/>