Comment 25 for bug 1267393

> I think we can all agree that a Trusty desktop and Precise database server is a pretty common situation, and the combination
of all the things that won't work is definitely common enough to make it a real issue.

Of course. How come that mixing different Ubuntu releases worked in the previous python version? You said you are testing backwards compatibility, so why would that break in a package based approach?

Traditionally the Tech board has nacked everything in main which pulls code from third-party sources, i. e. "installer packages". Packages in main must not enable any third-party PPA, pull code or binaries from an upstream site and run it, and so on. The notable (and blessed) exception is flashplugin-installer, which is in multiverse for that reason. We do that for a good reason: There is an established trust level in Ubuntu packages. They have stability promise and defined procedures for post-release maintenance (security and bug fix updates with corresponding verification mechanisms), have a cryptographically secure trust path, they have a defined and well-working mirroring system around the world, there's well-known tools for local caching/mirroring, we can build installer images with them, and so on.

All of this would break down if we don't actually ship a binary package for juju clients which gets installed into ubuntu guest images. (Of course the repeatedly discussed immaturity of golang wrt dynamic linking and language changes also play a big role here). If you want to go down that route, I think you should go the full way and not pretend that we have and support Ubuntu binaries at all, and just always download the juju bits from simplestreams. With that you can support the same version on all Ubuntu releases and other OSes, but of course you have to introduce your own QA mechanisms, trust path to the binararies you download, options for local mirroring, and so on. So that comes with a big price attached, but it seems that's the direction you want to go to?

(Caveat: I have no idea what simplestreams is and how it works; the description on https://launchpad.net/simplestreams isn't very enlightening, but it sounds like you want to use it as a kind of package distribution system not unlike pip?)