Re: [Launchpad-users] PPA's and officially supported vs. community-supported (ports) architectures

[Celso Providelo <celso.providelo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Jun 19, 2009 at 3:06 AM, Richard Wilbur<richard.wilbur@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Is there a way to upload signed binary packages for community-supported
> architectures to my PPA?
>
> Use cases:
> 1.  I have backported a fix to fspot v0.4.3.1 for Hardy 8.04.2 LTS that
> resolves a crash on the powerpc architecture which occurred every time I
> plugged in a digital camera.  The source package is in my PPA at
> https://launchpad.net/~richard-wilbur/+archive/ppa which includes
> automatic builds for each of the officially supported architectures
> (i386, amd64, lpia) but not powerpc.  I attached the powerpc binary
> build to the bug report
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/f-spot/+bug/176707 and
> nominated the fix for inclusion in a Hardy maintenance release.
>
> 2.  The bzr distributed version control system http://bazaar-vcs.org/
> maintains a PPA https://launchpad.net/~bzr/+archive/ppa for builds of
> recent versions but can only support the official architectures at this
> address through the normal Launchpad PPA process.  Users of other
> architectures, even community-supported (ports) such as powerpc, have to
> download the source package and build their own binary package to be
> able to make use of this repository.

Hi Richard,

I understand your problem, although I find it very unlikely that we
will open the gates for binaries generated outside LP, because it
defeats a very important aspect of PPAs, trusted source -> binary
path.

In the same way I think the need of supporting powerpc, sparc, ia64
and hppa in PPAs is decreasing very quickly (unfortunate for some, but
...)

There are also bug reports requesting us to stop publishing
architecture-independent binaries for unsupported architectures in
PPAs, probably because they confuse users:

https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/soyuz/+bug/156904
https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/soyuz/+bug/329630

That said, I think we should investigate a solution for this problem
probably without counting on PPAs for hosting community-built
binaries.

We can always fallback to the official ubuntu backports repository or
the debian one (which was the original way of solving this) and/or
maybe hosting the signed debs in Bzr project in LP.

-- 
Celso Providelo <celso.providelo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
IRC: cprov,  Jabber: cprov@xxxxxxxxxx, Skype: cprovidelo
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