Comment 5 for bug 251155

On Wed, Jul 23, 2008 at 8:42 PM, ChameleonDave <email address hidden> wrote:
> Thanks.
>
> I didn't quite understand "as you can do with the current PPA
> dependencies". What can I currently do with the PPA dependencies? I
> don't see any way of setting any special options.

Currently you can configure your PPA to use binaries from other PPAs
to build its packages.

Let's say you are building a device driver and you want it to always
build on-top-of the latest kernel available in the
Ubuntu-kernel-developers PPA. Instead of lurking around, finding which
one is the latest kernel version and copying it to your PPA, you can
simple set your PPA to depend on ubuntu-kernel-team PPA.

See launchpad.net/people/+me/+archive/+edit-dependencies

Once it's set the archive dependency(ies) binaries will be used to
build the sources uploaded to your PPA, as expected the highest
version of a requested build dependency (considering the whole set of
archive dependencies) will be installed.

> I don't see what implications using something from "proposed" would
> have. We're not talking about a dependency of the finished package
> here, just something that needs to be on the machine that compiles it.
> No one using the package will ever even know that linux-libc-dev
> 2.6.24-19.37 was used. By the time that a few people have started to
> use my PPA, the chances are that 2.6.24-19.37 will have made it into the
> main repos anyway.

Well, you can't guarantee a build-dependency will *not* affect the
dependencies of the resulted binaries (in fact, it usually does),

Also, in the case it doesn't (you are lucky) you would be shipping
binaries that would require an extra pocket to be enabled in order to
rebuild the package locally.

You can't even be sure that the proposed version will made its way to -updates.

Just to give you an idea, in ubuntu primary archive, only sources
uploaded to proposed pocket itself are able to use build-deps from
proposed, the same goes for backports.

> There is a lot of talk about plans and the way things are done around
> here, but isn't there documentation? It's always going to feel like I'm
> running up against the whims of a couple of individuals unless I can
> consult something which is clearly written down in black and white,
> *before* I have to file a bug due to my failure. I want to RTFM.

Right, the current documentation isn't even close to 'enough' and we
will be working to improve it this next cycle, step-by-step operations
and a enhanced packaging-guide.

Meanwhile, the best place to ask about PPAs is #ubuntu-motu on freenode.

> It seemed to me that the proper way to contribute to the community was
> to use something like Launchpad PPA, but I'll just have to create a repo
> on my own website if there are too many hurdles here.

You don't have to, over one thousand of developers are using PPAs and
while it's not fully functional for 100 % of the cases, we are working
to cover most of them the faster we can.

--
Celso Providelo <email address hidden>
IRC: cprov, Jabber: <email address hidden>, Skype: cprovidelo
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