PPA Packages should have a URL to reference them

[Ted Gould]

A typical use case for me is that I build a package to test a bug fix. I'll then upload this package to my PPA and comment on the bug to ask people who are having the issue if the package fixes the problem. Currently, the only URL that I have to give them is for the full PPA. While this works for most folks, it doesn't tell them exactly what they should be grabbing. It would be nice to have a page that was the specific package for including the bug reports.

I tried control clicking on the package and got this URL:

https://launchpad.net/%7Eted/+archive/bugfix/+sourcepub/612351/+listing-archive-extra

Which is roughly what I'd like, but this seems to lack formatting and I'm guessing it's an internal URL of some type.

[Martin Albisetti (beuno)]

This is an interesting use case to address, and fits in to the "I just want a deb" use case.
Celso, what are your thoughts?

[Celso Providelo (cprov)]

Yes, it is ... pretty much as 'Make my PPA look more like Ubuntu in LP'.

First, PPA package searches can be bookmarked, for instance:

https://edge.launchpad.net/~ted/+archive/bugfix?field.name_filter=indicator-messages&field.status_filter=published&field.series_filter=jaunty

But since it doesn't consider version, it will change when the maintainer uploads a new source.

We could include a version filter, but doesn't really help the search purpose ... the UI would be complex.

OTOH, we already have that page snippet, used for filling the expanded rows in PPA pages. We could add the usual LP style in place for making it easier to the eyes and make the XHR extract only the needed bits. However I really dislike the traversal elements (source publication ID and the page name).

If we are going to make it a proper page, we should traverse on something like.

$PPA/+source/indicator-messages/0.1.6-0ubuntu2~ppa2

But making that page (and its parent) useful will require a lot more than only CSS, it'd need more context information about the PPA itself, otherwise the user would get lost clicking back and forward several times.

Apparently, we can do both implementations and find out which one is the best :)