Proposing a New App Developer Upload Process

[Michael Hall]

On 09/04/2012 09:39 AM, Scott Kitterman wrote:
> The problem isn't just with file conflicts with current packages, it's that 
> these packages will now start using up distro namespace.  If some app 
> developer package ships the file /usr/games/bird-game, even though there's no 
> current conflict, there is a package sync'ed from Debian that also ships 
> /usr/games/bird-game then there's a conflict we have to resolve.  In /opt in a 
> proper vendor namespace this can never happen.

If bird-game already exists in Extras, and then a different package is
allowed into backports that will install files into the same location,
then yes there is a possibility for a conflict.  But I assume part of
the backports approval process already checks for conflicts, as they may
exist with another package in the stable release already, so that
process could easily be extended to include Extras packages as well.


> A fairly contrived example derived from the above is if the Debian/Ubuntu 
> package that shipped /usr/games/bird-game was in the archive and an app 
> developer package was uploaded that shipped /usr/bin/bird-game, it could be 
> run instead since /usr/bin precedes /usr/games on the standard user path. 

This would only happen if two different apps were both called
"bird-game" but otherwise different.  This situation is also possible
already, even between two packages in Universe.  How is that currently
handled?

> maybe a Python based app ships an embedded copy of a module since they've 
> tested with that version and don't want to test with the distro version and 
> they write their setup.py to install it in /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-
> packages.  Suddenly every user of that module is now using the app developer 
> package version and not the distro version.

Installing python modules in the system directories is not allowed under
this process.  Check the whitelist defined in the "App Preparation"
section of the spec.


Michael Hall
mhall119 at ubuntu.com