Re: [Vala] Vala-team PPA packages

On 07/27/2012 11:28 AM, Eric Gregory wrote:
> Apologies in advance if this is the wrong place to ask about the Vala PPA,
> but I was wondering if it would be possible to have a slight policy change.
> 
> Currently, only builds of the latest releases of the unstable and stable
> branches are kept in the repo.  The problem with this approach is if that
> version contains a critical bug, all Launchpad projects which depend on the
> Vala PPA will fail to build.
> 
> Fortunately there's a simple solution -- keep the previous builds in the
> repo.  This way projects which require an exact version of Vala can
> continue to build on Launchpad, and end-users can install and "lock" a
> specific version of Vala on their system if need be.

I don't know much about the Launchpad/PPA system, or who's in charge of
the Vala PPA, however I have to ask the obvious question:

Are other PPAs set up like this? Is this common? If there is relevant
Ubuntu policy, what does it say? Can't people worried about
incompatible/buggy updates in Vala, but who still need recent versions
from the PPA, simply Build-Depends up to the newest version they've checked?

End-users, of course, can already instruct apt to lock a package to a
specific version. This has been possible with Debian (and Ubuntu, of
course) for as long as I can remember (which is quite a while)

Thomas

> 
> Does this sound reasonable?  Is there a reason the PPA is currently not