Please support running against Ubuntu archive

[Benjamin Drung]

Several ppa commands are also useful to run against the Ubuntu archive (e.g. "ppa wait"). Please add support for running against the Ubuntu archive.

When you implement that support, the name of the command and the project does not match any more. A new name should probably be picked. Consider moving this tool into ubuntu-dev-tools or take over the Launchpad related parts of ubuntu-dev-tools to have a separate package for all those Launchpad tools.

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

Thanks for filing this Benjamin, this reflects well the discussion we had.

You're right that expanding this to also cover -proposed and other archives should be doable with the same codebase (modulo some additional UI/UX work). I think that might be achievable as a short term task. Renaming the project may be a bigger task, and needs a bit more thought.

The last part regarding ubuntu-dev-tools is related but a bit orthogonal and could be tackled independently, so I've moved that to https://bugs.launchpad.net/ppa-dev-tools/+bug/1995708 and subscribed you.

[Dimitri John Ledkov (xnox)]

to be honest, ppa is just a launchpad archive; like the rest of them. Many other tools have similar usage patterns i.e. `pull-pkg` is the parent of pull-ppa-pkg and pull-lp-pkg and pull-debian-package etc.

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

Yeah the complication is less due to differences in APIs (both kinds of archives are literally presented through the same Launchpad object) but due more to differences in how they're used. The wait command in particular has some assumptions built in that mostly make sense in the case of a PPA that's only going to be building one thing at a time, etc. which totally doesn't hold true for the general archive. There's other little distinctions that are important, such as PPA's don't have pockets (-proposed/-release/-updates) but for the regular archive pocket-awareness is going to be much more relevant.

But from a user perspective that's all internal details; whether they're waiting for a package to build in a PPA vs. in the regular archive, having a convenient tool that operates consistently for both situations would be nice to have. So despite the internal complications it is definitely worth pursuit.