Bazaar Explorer and PPA

[Andrew SB]

On Mon, Jan 18, 2010 at 9:38 AM, John Arbash Meinel
<john at arbash-meinel.com> wrote:
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> Alexander Belchenko wrote:
>> Russel Winder пишет:
>>> On Mon, 2010-01-18 at 16:08 +0200, Alexander Belchenko wrote:
>>> [ . . . ]
>>>>> 2.  Oh no not another PPA :-((  Why can't we just have one PPA for all
>>>>> the core Bazaar related released stuff.  I really don't want to have
>>>>> 1000s of entries in my source.list.
>>>> I don't understand you: I'm windows user and don't use PPA. I'm just
>>>> know "they are exist". That's all I want to know.
>>>
>>> Conversely, I have no interest in Windows ;-)
>>>
>>> The problem here for Ubuntu users is that aptitude/apt-get/synaptic
>>> require knowledge of all the sources of installable packages.  Each and
>>> every source has to be named and the signing key installed.  This means
>>> the fewer the number of sources the better.  Splitting Bazaar components
>>> into separate PPAs is the fastest way to having no-one use them.
>>> Having all the Bazaar components in a single PPA is an administrative
>>> nightmare.   So really this is a lose--lose situation.  The right
>>> balance is to declare a core set of components (and qbzr and bzr-gtk
>>> call squarely into that set for Ubuntu) and suffer the management hassle
>>> for these components.
>>>
>>> The other argument I can use is that if Bazaar Explorer is on the Bazaar
>>> PPA then QBzr really ought to be as well.
>>
>> Usually I'm doing source releases for QBzr, build windows installer for
>> QBzr, and Gary build PPA package.
>>
>> Me and Gary are not part of the team who manage main bzr PPA, so every
>> time Gary has to ask somebody to copy our PPA to bzr PPA. I don't see
>> the way how to improve this situation.
>
> I'm pretty sure Gary was added. And certainly he can ping someone to
> update the bzr ppa.
>
> In this particular case, the ~bzr ppa is meant to hold the *stable*
> series. Which is qbzr 0.14 IIRC. The appropriate place for 0.17 is the
> ~bzr-beta ppa.
>
> The bigger question is why was bzr-explorer 0.10 copied to the *stable*
> ppa. It should not be there. 0.8.3 is the current stable release.

This is certainly my fault. I had confusion over just what the bzr
team considers a "stable" release. For instance, if qbz 0.17 and
bzr-explorer are 0.10 are considered unstable, why do their respective
homepages [1] [2] only offer download links for these unstable
releases and not the stable ones? Also  bzr-explorer 0.8.3 was never
packaged as a deb. I didn't package it until it hit 0.9, and at that
point I was asked to provide it in ~bzr. I only learned the other day
after waiting for a reply from
Gary about when qbz 0.17 would enter the ~bzr PPA that it is
considered unstable.


> It looks like ~andrewsomething put bzr-explorer 0.10 into ~bzr, and he
> should not have.
>
> Now, in ~ 1 month, we'll have 2.1.0 as the new stable, and everything
> should be copied over.
>
> I'm sorry that we didn't notice this problem earlier. At this point,
> debian repos don't really let us roll-back to 0.8.3 (which is pretty
> crummy). I'm not sure how to get out of this mess without forcibly
> upgrading everyone to the 2.1 series rather than the 2.0 series.

I've been uncertain about just how to handle this situation myself
since I found out 0.17 is "unstable.". As bzr-explorer's linux install
instructions [3] direct people to use the ~bzr-explorer-dev PPA
perhaps I should remove bzr-explorer completely from the ~bzr PPA
until a "stable" release has been made. If I understand this thread
correctly, it sounds like the bzr-explorer package should never have
been put in the ~bzr PPA in the first place.

-- Andrew Starr-Bochicchio

[1] http://wiki.bazaar.canonical.com/QBzr
[2] http://doc.bazaar.canonical.com/explorer/en/
[3] http://doc.bazaar.canonical.com/explorer/en/install-linux.html