Bazaar Explorer and PPA

[John Arbash Meinel]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1


...
>>> 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.

As of bzr 2.0 we decided to split off a "stable" (bugfix only) series
and a "development" series. Specifically, 2.0.* has only bugfixes
relative to 2.0.0 such that we expect to have little difficulty asking
for a Stable Release Update from Ubuntu.

The artifact of "unstable" is just that internally we are allowed to
develop new features, redesign apis, etc. Things that might break a
plugin, or have a larger chance to break something.

Going further, the Windows installers bundles certainly plugins. Since
that is the primary experience for Windows users, we asked that plugins
also do stable releases. They certainly don't have to, but we will try
not to bundle new feature development into the 2.0.* installers.

New development work should be done in the 2.1 series, and we are happy
to bundle new versions of plugins (bzr-explorer, qbzr, etc) there. The
series is currently marked "beta", though TBH our "beta" is more stable
than most people's releases. The primary difference is that we don't
guarantee internal api's (used by plugins, etc) are as stable.


It makes sense to manage the PPAs in the same fashion. We'll put the
current stable release of bzr in ~bzr, and expect to have the matching
plugins there (qbzr, bzr-explorer, bzr-svn, etc).

Basically, we would *like* to have everything in ~bzr be a viable
candidate for backporting via SRU into Karmic (and in the future Lucid)
updates. People who don't want to wait for the SRU process can then
subscribe to the ppa, and people who really do want the latest code can
use the ~bzr-beta-ppa.



> 
> 
>> 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
> 

It sounds like bzr-explorer 0.9 should not have been put into the ~bzr
ppa, I agree.

Also, as to the qualification "unstable". I would like to say that
everything in ~bzr and ~bzr-beta-ppa should pass all of their test
suites. So not unstable as in likely broken, just "development" where
new features are introduced, etc.

The other thing about a "stable" release for bzr, at least, is that we
are promising to continue to do bugfixes for the stable release for at
least 6 months (and likely at least 1 year). I don't know that the
plugin community has the same commitment for older releases. Which is
ok, there are only so many man-hours to put into things. As long as
there aren't any serious bugs, we certainly don't have to get new
versions of the plugins. (And if there were, we could always fix them
and ask for a new release based on the older codebase.)

Right now we also suffer a little bit, because the person managing the
~bzr ppa (johnf) doesn't have enough time to bring the ~bzr-beta-ppa
up-to-date. So people who want to install the latest bzr development
version (2.1 series) have not been able to use a ppa.

Though if the Windows installers are any indication, there are 10x as
many people that want the 2.0 "stable" version, and most likely most
people who would use the beta-ppa are able to use the source directly.
(bzr co lp:bzr, lp:qbzr, etc.)

John
=:->
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (Cygwin)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/

iEYEARECAAYFAktUrZ8ACgkQJdeBCYSNAAPdPgCg06cGjnT2EVhA7HPtWVCWUHZM
lFYAnRxUeM7d2j+YKDGLGkeC509XsGAX
=DApL
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----