Tips for Launchpad PPAs
Launchpad has relatively new (well, a few months old) feature called Personal Package Archives.
PPAs have been taken up quite a lot by people making variations of packages in Ubuntu. One common situation is that developers will put pacakages with a proposed fix for a bug up into their PPA to let people try it out and confirm the bug is fixed.
I have been using them this week to make packages of Bazaar.
It's a pretty nice service; with probably less hassle than setting it up ourselves we have a nice apt archive that can be uploaded to by anyone in our team, and that rebuilds across several supported architectures. I hope with a bit more scripting we will be building these automatically on each release.
One piece of advice is to create a team specifically for packaging. PPAs as the name implies are owned by people or teams, so the URLs people put into their apt sources are bound to that team. So if, maybe later on, you want to allow more people, or indeed fewer people, to upload to the archive that can most easily be accomplished by making a specific team for it in the first place. Team memberships is transitive so you can always add your whole project's team to the PPA team. I put ours under ~bzr but it would have been better to use ~bzr-ppa. Or indeed, to allow for several different types of archive, maybe ~bzr-ppa-stable.
(More later, it's after 6 and enough for a week.)
posted Fri 22 Feb 2008 in /software/launchpad | link
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