launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Julian Edwards <julian.edwards@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thursday 03 November 2011 11:43:04 Francis J. Lacoste wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Linaro is interested in having an archive available with ddeb for all of
> the packages.
> 
> We don't support ddeb in derived archives, and the way it's implemented
> for PPA doesn't really work for them either, as it requires
> modifications to the packaging of all packages for which they want ddeb.
> 
> They could work-around this by uploading a modified debhelper to a PPA
> that automatically builds the ddeb. But that would mean they'd have to
> make sure that their customized debhelper is always ahead of the one in
> the distro and that they need to upload packages to both the ddeb PPA as
> well as their main one. Plus they want to move to derived distro.
> 
> So the question is how can we support enabling ddeb building
> automatically in PPA and derived distros.
> 
> Cheers

We're not really that close to enabling ddebs in primary archives (which 
includes derived distros).  William thinks that the approach taken so far is 
wrong and I am inclined to agree with him.

The original requirement was that the ddebs for Ubuntu were published in a 
separate archive, otherwise the main archive would start bulging to three 
times its size and there was the worry that this would cause mirrors to drop 
Ubuntu.

However, keeping deb and ddeb publications in lockstep across two archives is 
proving to be pretty nasty for various reasons so we are looking at mashing 
them in the same archive again, but getting the primary mirroring script to 
split them out at that point.  We'd not have to do that for derived distros 
since we don't mirror them.

I need to talk to William some more about this to see where the code is at, 
since he has done the vast bulk of it.  Hopefully we can offer a strategy 
tomorrow.

Cheers.