On Wed, Dec 16, 2009 at 12:44:27PM -0500, Curtis Hovey wrote: > About 1/3 of all packaging links between Lucid and upstream projects are > to source package that are not in Lucid. I think there are two causes > for this. The first is that links are not validated because the design > allows upstreams to link to *any* distribution series. The second is > that users have co-opted this feature in an effort to indicate it built > packages. We need to re-examine our intent from both Ubuntu's and the
I don't understand the second part here -- what do you mean "indicate it built packages" -- what do you mean by "it" and for what release? > The feature is limited because the distributions and their series must > be registered in Launchpad. Even if they are, Launchpad does not know > the versions in other distributions to present to the user. This is not > entirely true because Launchpad does know something of Debian, but that > information is always stale and not immediately available. So of the > many thousands of packaging link, this is a summary on the non-Ubuntu > links: > > Debian 76 > Guadalinex 4 > Gentoo 1 > > To support other distributions, Launchpad records the *kind* of > packaging: primary or included. Ubuntu only cares about primary links > because what it cares about is knowing the bug tracker, and development > branch of the upstream. The 'included' links are a distraction for > Ubuntu. They are also confusing to upstreams; packaging is not their > first concern. > > PROPOSAL: If we choose to desupport other distros, we can remove the > confusing aspect of the packaging form. I think instead we could just allow the links to be done to distribution, and where possible the annotation with distroseries is added, where it's not available, just let it be. > * Upstream creates an Ubuntu package for Karmic. > * Upstream does not see a way to link a archive to the project. > * Upstream uses <project>/<series>/+addpackage to state that a > package was made. > * Upstream is saddened to see that Launchpad does not know the > version of the package, and the links do not go to the archive; > they go to a source package that says the package does not > exist. We could fix the latter with smarter heuristics if we really wanted to. But I agree this is a broken story. > Launchpad could verify that the package is in the distroseries and > prevent upstream from creating impossible links. This ensures that every > package listed will have an official version number listed. This may > disappoint upstream users use consider their packages just as important > as Ubuntu's official packages. > > Launchpad could ask the upstream user to specify that the link is not > for an official archive, and possibly allow the user to specify a PPA. > This overlaps with the official-project-ppas feature that we hope to > build in our life time. Yeah, I think doing both of the above makes more sense. But let's look at it from a higher-level perspective: the issue is that packaging seems to be useful metadata, but it's not clear anywhere what it might be useful for. So I think tackling that first should make the UI much easier to get right. I had a good meeting with Martin A. and we talked over what we should change in the data model; Mark was happy with the idea and I believe it was essentially to make the linkage's distroseries and productseries columns optional, and using that information in a smart way (i.e. superseding it as updates were made, perhaps similarly to how the package-publication model works). Have you thought about implementing that as part of your fix-packaging project? -- Christian Robottom Reis | [+55 16] 3376 0125 | http://launchpad.net/~kiko | [+55 16] 9112 6430 | http://async.com.br/~kiko _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~launchpad-dev Post to : [email protected] Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~launchpad-dev More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
