Proposing a New App Developer Upload Process

[Michael Terry]

On 04/09/12 10:12, Emmet Hikory wrote:
> Michael Terry wrote:
>> I imagine the easiest way to avoid this is to namespace the package
>> names too.
>>
>> (Though with namespaced packages, the user can end up in a weird
>> situation if the Extras package "foo" does find its way into Debian
>> and Ubuntu quantal.  Then, they really do want the "foo" package
>> from Debian but are left with the non-maintained "extras-foo" from
>> precise.)
>      One way to work around these cases would be to have a transitional
> extras-foo in quantal-extras, which Depends: on foo, so that upgrading
> users would migrate from extras-foo to foo during the upgrade process.
> At some point the extras-foo package ought be removed from the system,
> but this is true for all the historical transitional packages, and so
> better handled as part of a general solution for that class of problem.

Good point.  That's a way around the (likely not overwhelming) number of 
Extras packages that make it into Debian if we namespace the packages.

So I'm even more certain that we should namespace the package names 
themselves.  Without doing so, we can't really guarantee that the 
package won't switch completely out from under the user.  We'd both be 
removing an app they thought they had as well as installing a package 
they didn't request (which could have quite bad side effects).

-mt