ubuntu-core-dev PPA?

[Scott Kitterman]

On Thursday 18 September 2008 16:58, 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?

I suppose it would.  

For Kubuntu we seem (in my view anyway) to deal with these kinds of problems 
OK without a centralized PPA for the development release.  I think it's 
similarly true for Server Team.  

I think that there is some complexity associated with this idea.  I'm not sure 
the benifit is worth the trouble, but for some areas of packaging it probably 
is.  As long as we have a good policy for when to use it, how stuff gets 
moved to the archive, and how conflicts get resolved, I don't see it being 
harmful to give it a try and see how useful it is.

Scott K