Backporting, PPA, and other important things in life

[Khashayar Naderehvandi]

Hi all,

It's great to be on the team. I've been spending the last days going
from basically knowing little more than how to do an apt-get, to
actually fiddling with the contents of debian/. Needless to say, I've
much left to learn. But I'm getting there. So bear with me, and,
please, correct me whenever I do weird things.

So far, the only thing I've actually done (with the help of Cory and
Scott) that might affect the state of the ubuntu archives, has been to
backport ardour 2.7.1, and put a link to the packages in the
appropriate bug report. Since I'm not a MOTU, there's not much more I
can do (yet) other than point the people with power to the backports,
and just hope that that gets them somewhere.

This is why the ubuntustudio-dev PPA becomes important as a possible
natural stopping place for packages. It might be a good idea to have
the backports in the PPA until they are approved, at which point they
can be moved to where they belong. Cory mentioned that putting the
backports there, though, possibly could lead to duplicate efforts and
a big mess a in the end where the same package is found at a bunch of
different locations. Obviously, I'd like to avoid that, as well as I
would like to avoid having packages "stuck" in the PPA instead of
having them in the -backports. I do think that, if we agree on a list
of packages to push for, it would still make sense for me to put them
in the PPA. When they're there, I will have a natural spot to direct
reviewers and MOTUs who can take it a step further. Also, people who
want to test the backports can do so, which is always a good thing.

So far, I've uploaded two packages to the PPA, audacity-1.3.6 and
hydrogen 0.9.4beta2. Audacity 1.3.6 was released a while ago but it's
neither in debian unstable, nor jaunty. I've been trying to figure out
a way to update the package directly on debian, but couldn't really
find my way around their BTS, and, frankly, even if I had, I really
wouldn't know what to do, since I don't have debian installed. There
is a backporting request on launchpad for 1.3.6, but since it's not
even in jaunty yet, that bug report is invalid. Like you can see, I'm
still trying to understand what the proper way is to get this package
in any archive other than ubuntustudio's own PPA.

Regarding hydrogen 0.9.4beta2, I'm thinking I should contact the
upstream authors and see if they have any release schedule, if they
do, and it looks plausible, perhaps we could try to get 0.9.4 in
jaunty. I've been using it for a while and I think it's a great
improvement over 0.9.3.

So the two big questions are:
1) How do we want to make use of the PPA?
2) Which packages are important to try and backport?

When it comes to ubuntustudio-audio, hardy's really the way to go.
Speaking as a *user* of ubuntustudio, for my home music production,
what I always wanted to have was a really stable core system (i.e.
hardy), with up-to-date tools (ardour, audacity, hydrogen, etc.). Some
of the packages in hardy are really getting old.

So, what do you all think?
Me, I'm going to bed now :-)

(One more thing before I finish (wrt audacity 1.3.6): Like I write
above, I'm still a bit confused about what steps to take regarding
packages that have new upstream versions, but aren't packaged in
either debian or ubuntu. With new packages, revu's the place. With
backports, it's launchpad. How about this case, then? Is the proper
way a "needs-packaging" bug in launchpad + a link to the package I've
made?)

All the best,
Khashayar