Updating the beta ppa.

[Martin Pool]

On 10 February 2010 05:18, John Arbash Meinel <john at arbash-meinel.com> wrote:
> I believe Johnf had also done some work on improving the build step (to
> use autoppa to manage building for many distributions concurrently). He
> mentioned that he did not get a chance to post his updates yet, but it
> might be helpful to get some information from him.

I would really like to make sure this is not on any one person's shoulders.
>
> If you look at Martin's earlier post ([rfc] focus on Ubuntu updates
> rather than PPA packaging), we are talking about refocusing on getting
> stable releases into backports rather than trying to keep a PPA
> completely in sync.

I think we should mostly emphasize the Ubuntu packaging, for instance
by working on  <https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/bzr/+bug/302987>.
 It's not always obvious what you can do if you're not part of the sru
or backports teams, but you can always ask them what to do.

However, if someone does want to update the PPAs I think that is
great.  Looking at recent traffic there is a gap here that people
can't get the betas and can't test 2.2rc.

> Part of this is motivated by the fact that we now have 2 stable series
> (2.0 and 2.1), which would require us to create another PPA (you can
> only have 1 active package in a PPA, and old ones are just not available
> anymore.) Then you also have nightlies, etc. And you can't just update
> one component because of the lock-step version dependencies. Which would
> hint that you need a 'staging' ppa for every actual ppa. So you can
> upload a newer bzr, and then a newer bzrtools, etc. And once that
> finally reaches a stable collection, you copy that wholesale into the
> public ppa (eg a 2.0 stable ppa).
>
> It seems like the stable-release-branch approach should make it a bit
> easier to keep ppa stability (though witness the recent mistake of
> adding bzr-explorer 0.11 to the stable ppa, when it really isn't
> compatible with the stable qbzr...)
>
> I think we are still trying to sort out where a good balance is, between
> the effort necessary to keep a PPA (or 4) up-to-date and the value for
> people who are using it.

I think we do need to work out where to concentrate our efforts but
packaging recent major releases or rcs is pretty clearly good.

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