ubuntu-core-dev PPA?

[Bryce Harrington]

On Thu, Sep 18, 2008 at 11:12:57PM +0200, Emilio Pozuelo Monfort wrote:
> Colin Watson wrote:
> > On Thu, Sep 18, 2008 at 03:49:37PM -0400, Scott Kitterman wrote:
> >> On Thursday 18 September 2008 15:40, Colin Watson wrote:
> >>> 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.
> >> I think we'd also have to worry about packages getting uploaded both to the 
> >> archive and to the PPA needing to be merged at the end of the freeze.  This 
> >> can probably be mechanized pretty well once we've transitioned to DVCS 
> >> packaging, but I can see it being potentially problematic now.
> > 
> > That's a good point. We could publish a list of all such packages after
> > the freeze, or even set up a cron job to do so during the freeze; it
> > would just be a matter of grabbing the Sources files at the start of the
> > freeze and then tracking the divergence. Would that help?
> > 
> 
> Wouldn't it be easier to go back to really freeze the archive, so that people
> can just upload as usual, and only those packages needed for the release are
> unblocked by the release team? When the release is done, the archive is unfrozen
> and everything which was uploaded is processed.

I don't think this would be good.  After FF, a lot of us shift focus
from development to mostly bug fixing, and so being able to get the more
critical of these fixes in easily eliminates a lot of the confusion and
hassle when we had a hard freeze.

> This would be similar to your proposal except that the uploaded packages
> wouldn't be available in the PPA, but I don't think that's a big issue.

Well, being able to get packages smoke tested soon after you upload them
is a nice thing.  If a bunch of stuff is sitting untested in a limbo,
that then all gets dumped in at once, then if there is a breakage, it
could make it tricker to narrow down which upload caused the problem.

Certainly being in a PPA would reduce the number of people doing
testing, but presumably enough would be running it that the worst
problems could be caught.

Bryce