ubuntu-core-dev PPA?

[Colin Watson]

On Thu, Sep 18, 2008 at 11:12:57PM +0200, Emilio Pozuelo Monfort wrote:
> 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.

While this has the marginal benefit of simplicity, it has several other
much more serious problems, at least:

 * While packages are sitting in the unapproved queue, they don't get
   built, and developers don't get feedback on them because nobody can
   use them. A PPA would allow the packages to be built and tested
   during the freeze.

 * It often happens that multiple developers upload the same package by
   mistake. The unapproved queue can't offer a very good interface to
   resolving conflicts here (at the moment it is about as bad as
   possible in that it lets all the uploads in and then some random
   subset get rejected later, but fixing this properly would involve
   effectively duplicating the functionality of PPAs).

 * Unloading everything into the main archive at once makes it harder to
   track down regressions.

There are reasons we stopped doing hard freezes for milestones!

> 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.

Sebastien has specifically asked for the ability to upload packages and
have users test them during the freeze. As somebody who often has
problems with freeze states that overlap with GNOME releases, his
opinion carries a lot of weight here.

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]