Ubuntu needs a new development model

[Dmitrijs Ledkovs]

On 6 May 2010 02:38, Ryan Oram <ryan at infinityos.net> wrote:
> All the packages I have pulled from dev PPAs have been of high
> quality. In fact, most of them fix problems present in the Ubuntu
> packages.
>
> Really only a minimal amount of review and testing should be needed.
> Ubuntu would just need to require that developers build their packages
> on Launchpad before review. Launchpad is an excellent filter in
> itself. We all know how much of a pain signing up for a Launchpad
> upload privileges is, in addition to the effort required to get
> something to even build on Launchpad (pbuilder is awesome, but boy
> getting something to build in a chroot environment can be a hassle).
>
> Ryan
>

Answer: It broke the flow of reading
.
Question: Why is top posting bad?

Please stop that.


The high-quality ppa's are done by Ubuntu&Debian developers and not
upstream authors. Those that are fixing bugs in Ubuntu are targetted
at ubuntu archive after sufficient testing is done and uploaded.

PPAs bitrot: it fixes one thing but ubuntu archive moves on and you
are stuck either with old version with one fix from ppa or newer
version from archive which has these after cool features but not this
one fix.

Plus I've been hit personally when ppa's don't provide versions for
the current release.

As for building on launchpad it is theoretically possible to make a
binary blob tarball upload it and just run dpkg-deb*

* I haven't tried it myself & possibly there are auto-rejection
scripts on launchpad to detect this.
> On Wed, May 5, 2010 at 9:30 PM, Dmitrijs Ledkovs
> <dmitrij.ledkov at ubuntu.com> wrote:
>> Upstream developers build from trunk and they don't care on how to
>> package it cause they personally do not need it.
>>
>> Upstreams don't usually have a clue in packaging and spend quite a bit
>> of time trying to make it build and ignoring all lintian warnings
>> because someone asked them to & there is no real package available in
>> the archive.
>>
>> These upstream debanisations are usually of poor quality and can do
>> nasty things to your machine (static libs, auto-updating and pinging
>> upstream about userbase => google chrome & they do know how to package
>> btw so this was on purpose and not to make it fit into the system)
>>
>>
>> If some project doesn't have a package it is either new, unnoticed, or
>> half-broken code that it cannot justify packaging effort.
>
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