[Ubuntu] [Qgis-user] GRASS support lost (again) on Ubuntu/Mint

[Sebastiaan Couwenberg]

On 09/28/2017 07:09 PM, Angelos Tzotsos wrote:
> I think we have to make the publishing process more strict in the
> future, that is no one publishes directly on Unstable, no mater how nice
> the new version of a package is, until a full transition and testing is
> done.

That's too strict for grass updates in my opinion, I don't do a official
transition for grass in Debian either. I just rebuild the reverse
dependencies after moving a new upstream release of grass to unstable.
The process for UbuntuGIS is pretty much the same.

The QtWebKit issues in qgis were problematic because the people updating
qgis in UbuntuGIS were not involved with QtWebKit deprecation in Debian
and the changes made to the qgis package for that. It also didn't help
that the previous updates that also ran into this issue didn't use a
branch in the git repository to have to changes preserved in the
subsequent updates.

These kind of issues are to be expected for users of PPAs, especially
those that use more than one PPA (e.g. ubuntugis-unstable + qgis.org).
Lack of integration or delays between them are inherent to separate
repositories managed by different people. The qgis.org packages now tend
to be rebuild when dependencies in ubuntugis require it, this was much
more problematic in the past.

Most importantly the ubuntugis contributors need to gain more experience
with the packages and what more needs to be done in certain cases other
than the plain rebuilds that are sufficient most of the time.

Things that can help improve the situation is doing binary builds before
a source-only upload to Launchpad. Those binary packages can then be
tested with piuparts and autopkgtest to verify that they install and
upgrade correctly for example. This is done automatically by the QA
infrastructure in Debian, but lacks for Launchpad builds.

Kind Regards,

Bas

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