Getting new packages into Ubuntu

[Barry Warsaw]

On Oct 10, 2011, at 02:06 PM, Jeremy Bicha wrote:

>Instead of a new repository (extras or PPAs or whatever), why don't we use
>backports more to get new packages into the stable releases?  Firefox and
>Chromium, though special, have at least opened the door more to stable
>updates that aren't just bug fixes.

Further, if we had "official PPAs" we could perhaps do some automated
promotion from an official PPA into backports, so users wouldn't have to
add-apt-repository for dozens of packages.

Many projects already have de-facto official PPAs, and these are great for
getting access to newer versions of packages in your current Ubuntu version,
or even packages which aren't available at all (e.g. pypy).  Unfortunately,
there's no way to mark PPAs as "official" so users may not be able to rely on
the reputation of the PPA uploaders.

A promotion from PPA would still require a rebuild to ensure the consistency
of the archive being promoted into.  Maybe backports is the right archive for
these promotions, or maybe some other channel would be best, but it would be
nice if it were easy for users to enable it.

-Barry