[Ubuntu] UbuntuGIS ppa structure

[Johan Van de Wauw]

On Sat, Nov 9, 2013 at 10:19 PM, Ivan Mincik <ivan.mincik at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> I You think about it, my proposal to PPA structure is following:
>
> * ubuntugis-development - development versions of packages. Package version
> changes until they move to 'ubuntugis-staging'
>
> * ubuntugis-staging - staging versions which will be prepared to move at the
> time of each new ubuntu distribution release to 'ubuntugis-stable'
>
> * ubuntugis-stable - packages for all ubuntu distributions (LTS an non LTS)
> which will never change versions for a particular ubuntu distribution once
> released (only bugfixes available) - packages for each new distribution will
> be uploaded at the time of ubuntu distribution release
> Packages will be supported for each ubuntu distribution life time.
>
...
> Maintaining packages in 'ubuntugis-stable' for LTS distributions is
> long-term, responsible and boring task. This task I see as candidate for
> dedicated maintainer which could be financially supported by companies or
> organizations.
Ideally these packages should not be in a ppa but in universe (ubuntu
itself). If we keep in sync with debiangis the maintenance of these
packages will be much easier and not duplicated

I think maintenance in the first place this is not a role for
ubuntugis but for the project itself. I don't think it is good that
someone outside the project keeps patches, ... Ideally a project
should have maintenance releases as eg geoserver has. Usually no
packaging changes are needed for maintenance releases, so the
remaining job for debian/ubuntugis is not that hard.

In fact if we have a package in universe, it may not be uncommon that
security updates published by the projects are processed by motu's
employed by canonical.
In short, rather than duplicating work I think we should work more
with ubuntu to make sure recent packages are added and supported.

>
> * ubuntugis-backports - backported packages for LTS distributions. Can be
> upgraded as time goes on for all distributions

I think it is better not to have a seperate backports archive. I think
the development/staging packages should just exist for every release
we intend to support.
It also seems more practical for an end-user. He/She adds the ppa once
to get more recent versions of gis software than provided in universe.
Now you ask him/her to add this ppa, and then at one point in the
future to add the backports archive.
Having an extra ppa also increases the number of scenarios we have to
support: universe, universe+staging, universe+backports,
universe+staging+backports. Instead of 1 you get 3 combinations next
to universe. This becomes almost impossible to test every upload
especially if you take into account different ubuntu releases.