[rfc] focus on Ubuntu updates rather than PPA packaging

[Andrew Cowie]

On Wed, 2010-01-27 at 18:08 +0100, Martin Pool wrote:
> Our results so far show that beta releases are pretty stable and
> suitable for everyday use

That may be. Gentoo, for instance, is shipping the current beta.

But,

> ; they are only unstable in the sense that
> there are a larger volume of changes from month to month, and that
> they change APIs and may clash with plugins.

In the 1-15-1.18 period we went through hell with bzr-svn & bzr-gtk
packages not working with the current bzr package, etc.

Whatever you decide to pursue, I'd like to encourage you to create an
authoritative place to get "the current version Bazaar" both in tarball
and Debian package form.

The ~bzr PPA seems to have been admirably serving this purpose. It was
"the place to get the latest release of Bazaar" and I'd reasonably
expect it to bump from 2.0.x to 2.1.x when 2.1.x is finally released.

Evolving, I'd like to see bzr-git added there.


> Therefore I think it's
> reasonable for quite a fair number of advanced users to run betas as
> long as they can tolerate amount of API-related breakage: we want them
> to report it but they shouldn't be shocked that it happens.

You think?

I'm not so sure.

People who are "advanced" enough to at least communicate back to #bzr or
this list are *using* Bazaar; they really kinda want it to work. A bug
here and there that is [likely to be] rapidly addressed is one thing.
Plugin-failure-due-to-API-change breakage is just not something I would
expect people to be that interested in. As I noted above, we've been
there before, and it wasn't fun.

People will use that PPA if it works together, as a cluster. Otherwise,
they'll have no choice but to revert back to whatever their [ok, in this
case, Ubuntu] distro is shipping. In which case they'll be using
whatever ecosystem is there - somewhat old version of bzr and doubtless
hopelessly out of date versions of the supporting plugins.

Maybe you can get better mileage out of the SRU process, but to date
they've been unimpressive at publishing to your stable releases, and
unless you can easily update all the supporting plugin packages at the
same time, I don't think much will come of it.

> concentrate on helping with the teams doing packaging in Ubuntu and
> Debian rather than packaging ourselves into PPAs
> 
That doesn't seem unreasonable, I just don't think it'll get you
anywhere given how unresponsive downstream has been.

[I mean, shit, it shouldn't have to be your job to beg Canonical
packagers to package the latest release of a Canonical product. They
should be just doing it when you announce a release. And meanwhile, the
GNOME constellation has an "exception". Can you not get one too?]

> or if you want to test our nightlies,
> do [PPA]"

Only if the nightly PPA reliably results in a usable ecosystem.
Otherwise it's RPM hell.

AfC
Sydney

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