ubuntu-core-dev PPA?

[Colin Watson]

In a discussion about the eternal conflict between stabilising the
archive for milestones and allowing developers to get their work done
(particularly new GNOME releases, which put a lot of pressure on
Sebastien when the archive is frozen), Sebastien mentioned that it would
be useful if there were somewhere that everyone could upload to rather
than the main archive during freezes, which we could then blat into the
main archive en masse at the end.

Since this is mostly only an issue for main/restricted, at least for
milestone freezes, I suggested an ubuntu-core-dev PPA. What do people
think of this? We could make it standard practice that during milestone
freezes you can carry on doing normal uploads to the ubuntu-core-dev
PPA, and only upload to the main archive for milestone-critical
problems. At the end of the freeze we could automatically copy all the
source packages over to the main archive and have them rebuilt (or even
just copy the binaries if we're sure). This would mean that if you had
the ubuntu-core-dev PPA in your sources.list then you could generally be
sure of avoiding clashes with other developers, which isn't a property
we get out of a hard archive freeze.

If ubuntu-dev wanted to do the same, then they certainly could.

The only downside I can see is that if the freeze stretches out too long
then people who have the ubuntu-core-dev PPA in their sources.list will
be testing something at variance with the alphas. However, since the
bulk of milestone testing happens with CD images, I'm not all that
worried about this.

(Setting this up would need to be done by a member of the Technical
Board, in their capacity as administrator of ubuntu-core-dev.)

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]