"LTS overlay" PPA

[Khashayar Naderehvandi]

Hey folks,

As you know, I've been maintaining a sort of backports repo in my PPA.
It started out as a very personal thing. Hardy needed a few updates in
order to work well for me, so I thought the PPA could cover the
compilation part instead of my own machine. As a bonus, those updates
could be used by anyone who dared to take the risk. Mainly it was
ffado and jack I needed, but then I started backporting some core
applications as well, like ardour. After a while, I started
backporting plugins and rebuild applications against them, and so on
and so forth. I've had my doubts about the PPA, as I really think
things would be better ending up in the official channels, but the
fact is that this review-less backporting can happen much faster (for
better or worse), and requires very little effort from me. For
example, I simply backported scons from Jaunty in order to avoid the
scons problems we had wrt building ardour. Since scons only is a build
dependency, I could later remove scons from the PPA. This is of course
not ideal, but it's easily done. The people who have contacted me
generally are happy with the updated packages, and I've made sure to
point out every time that the backports are neither supported by
Ubuntu nor the Studio team, nor anyone else for that matter. And that
they might face a variety of weird problems.

I'd like to start up a new PPA that only includes backports for the
latest LTS release of Studio, a sort of rolling-release overlay on the
LTS. I don't want people to think it's an official -studio thing, but
I think it could benefit both users (and possibly also -studio) if
those who want up-to-date packages on a solid LTS base would have this
choice.

So, the questions are: can I go ahead and start this PPA? Would this
cause any issues because of the fact that I'm part of the team? I'm
happy to do this on my own, without and -studio support, but maybe
there would be a point in announcing it as a non-supported
semi-official -studio thing? Any thoughts on this?

Assuming I'll do it as personal thing, I'll of course continue to put
most of my effort in official backporting and packaging anyway. This
will remain a low-priority thing.

I won't start a PPA like this if the team believes it to either take
focus off Studio, or somehow harm our other efforts. Really, I'd just
like to use my own PPA for other stuff and have an LTS-studio-overlay
PPA for this stuff.

Thoughts?

Regards,
Khashayar