add-apt-repository crashes if no published signing key

[Kamal Mostafa]

I tried using add-apt-repository to add "ppa:ubuntu-hams/ppa" which is an empty PPA -- it exists, but no packages have ever been uploaded by 'ubuntu-hams' (so perhaps no signing key has been published?). Result is this crash:

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-hams/ppa
Exception in thread Thread-1:
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/threading.py", line 525, in __bootstrap_inner
    self.run()
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/softwareproperties/ppa.py", line 60, in run
    self.add_ppa_signing_key(self.ppa_path)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/softwareproperties/ppa.py", line 79, in add_ppa_signing_key
    '\"signing_key_fingerprint\": \"(\w*)\"', lp_page)[0]
IndexError: list index out of range

Note: As a test, I also tried using add-apt-repository with an empty PPA under my own username (where I have many other PPA's so my key is published) -- that works fine and I see that add-apt-repository does request and retrieve my own PPA publishing key in that case.

[Kamal Mostafa (kamalmostafa)]

I have verified that the problem does appear to be caused by the team/user never having uploaded any PPA: Once I uploaded a package to ppa:ubuntu-hams/ppa, the problem disappeared.