Getting new packages into Ubuntu

[Scott Kitterman]

On Monday, October 10, 2011 02:17:27 PM Barry Warsaw wrote:
> 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.

I don't know how a well maintained 'official' PPA would be less work than a 
update/backport approach for Ubuntu developers?  Such PPAs would still have to 
not conflict if the actual distribtution and not introduce library updates the 
affected other packages.  I think the things one would need to consider are 
about the same.

Scott K