[ec2-beta] RFC: screenbin -- like pastebin, but for screen, using Ubuntu in Amazon EC2

[Scott Kitterman]

On Tue, 13 Jan 2009 16:34:24 -0600 "Dustin Kirkland" <kirkland at ubuntu.com> 
wrote:
>On Tue, Jan 13, 2009 at 1:35 PM, Mark Shuttleworth
><mark.shuttleworth at canonical.com> wrote:
>> We really need a good way to make packages for multiple releases :-/
>
>CC-ing ubuntu-devel@, as I think this discussion would benefit from
>their input...
>
>I agree...
>
>I've struggled with this now for several small packages that I've
>created from scratch which (fortunately) do not depend on the Ubuntu
>release (screenbin, screen-profiles, update-motd, musica).  I build
>source packages separately for each release, bump each version, and
>push separately to my PPA.
>
>It would be nice to use wildcards, comparators, or lists in the
>release field in the changelog and have Launchpad/PPAs/Soyuz sort out
>the build complexy, pushing the .deb file to the correct locations and
>lists.
>
>For example, changelog entries that might look like:
> foo (1.0-0ubuntu1) *; urgency=low
> bar (1.0-0ubuntu1) dapper,hardy,intrepid; urgency=low
> baz (1.8) >dapper; urgency=low
> blah (1.3) <=jaunty; urgency=low
>
>Or, if not handled on the build side, perhaps on the developer end, by
>a changelog preprocessor built into the devscripts, that would parse
>this entry and perhaps construct a list of releases to build, and
>iterate over that list?
>
>Is this a violation of Debian policy?  I imagine that I have
>oversimplified the technical details ;-)  But there are enough smart
>people on these lists that I'm sure we can zero in on a viable
>solution.
>
I think for the archive, this is of limited value.  We need to be clear about practices that 
are appropriate for the archive and ones that are appropriate for 3rd party repositories such 
as PPAs.

One thing I've wanted is a different release target for PPA uploads.  If the upload target for 
PPA uploads was something like intrepid-ppa, then I' feel more comfortable 
with automation around multiple releases.  Maybe "debuild -S -ppa-all"?

Scott K