Staging area for hardy-proposed ?

[Michael Vogt]

On Wed, Jun 04, 2008 at 06:20:30PM -0700, Matt Zimmerman wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 04, 2008 at 05:28:20PM +0200, Michael Vogt wrote:
> > I would like to discuss if we should have a staging area for
> > hardy-proposed for updates that need to go in together at the same
> > time.
> > 
> > With hardy we have more changes than in previous releases and more
> > packages like openoffice (with its translations), firefox (with
> > xulrunner), compiz (with its plugins) and of course the kernel that
> > require multiple package to enter -proposed at the same time for a
> > flawless upgrade.
> > 
> > It would make the life of users with -proposed enabled a lot
> > easier. This also affects upgrade, for example bug #235583 is the
> > result of users with gutsy-proposed who try to upgrade to hardy. When
> > hardy-proposed is inconsitent the release upgrader will refuse the
> > upgrade because it would have to remove translation packages
> > (something that it refuses by default). 
> > 
> > I discussed this briefly with the launchpad soyuz team and one
> > possible way would be to have a trusted private PPA that is used for
> > the staging and then the results are copied over to
> > hardy-proposed. This will put additional work on the archive-admins
> > though (also I think we could script a lot of the consistency checks).
> > 
> > What do you think?
> 
> I would think that an ordinary PPA could be used for staging such a series
> of uploads, and then they could be copied across wholesale by an archive
> admin.  Why would a special PPA be needed?

My understanding is that with the current PPAs we can only do source
copies so build times come into play again, potential bad timing with
mirrors etc. 

Launchpad should soon get private PPAs that will allow binary copies
directly to -proposed.

Cheers,
 Michael