Proposing a New App Developer Upload Process

[Scott Kitterman]

On Thursday, September 06, 2012 04:14:40 AM Emmet Hikory wrote:
> > * File name conflicts: there I would suggest exploring Daniel's proposal
> > of relying on a conflict checker that works across all archives, so that
> > before an upload is accepted this service checks for any potential
> > clashes and informs the uploader to fix the package before they can do
> > the next submission. The uploader would either be an Ubuntu developer
> > (through the main archive) or an app developer (through extras, via
> > MyApps). This would not only benefit the app developer process, but also
> > fix the existing issue in the regular Ubuntu upload process.
> 
>     To avoid conflicts of interest, I suggest that agreeing that the
> content of the repository to be populated through MyApps is to be treated
> as part of Ubuntu is a prerequisite: otherwise there is too much potential
> for those Ubuntu Developers who have decided to entirely ignore the presence
> of a third-party external repository called "extras" to complain that their
> upload is unreasonably blocked, and no sensible conflict resolution path
> due to the lack of a common authority other than sabdfl.

That's not the only way to solve the procedural problem.  It's been 
established that the Ubuntu technical board has the authority to set policy 
for the Canonical Partner archive.  I have assumed that they do for extras as 
well.  If they don't, that can be fixed without redefining what is part of 
Ubuntu and what is external to it but related (for those unfamiliar, Partner 
is served from a different archive (archive.canonical.com) and not formally 
part of Ubuntu.

Aside from that, I think that if the goal is 100K MyApps packages the only 
thing that does drown under it's own weight is a containerizaton based 
approach where each MyApps package has it's own namespace and it can't conflict 
with either other MyApps packages or the distribution proper.

FWIW, I think it's entirely appropriate for Ubuntu developers to not be overly 
worried about third party repositories.  Any solution that requires them to be 
concerned will drive Ubuntu to a forked namespace with Debian and that will be 
a fundamental change in the way the distribution works that I don't think we 
want.

Scott K