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Re: Debian ppa



On Thu, 2010-09-23 at 10:36 +0200, Roland Mas wrote:
> William Grant, 2010-09-23 16:31:57 +1000 :
> 
> [...]
> 
> > While Launchpad.net does not provide Debian PPAs, what prevents you from
> > taking the Launchpad code, rebranding it, and running your own instance?
> 
> Based on a presentation given by Jonathan Lange (product strategist for
> Launchpad) at LSM this summer, the Launchpad code was never *really*
> intended to be run in other instances than launchpad.net.  It was
> initially a “that would be nice” feature, but nobody really took some
> time to do it, and it wasn't a constraint taken into account when
> designing the evolutions.  The code was eventually made publicly
> available after much nagging,

Indeed. I was behind a lot of said nagging.

> but a friend of mine who tried installing
> it ran away screaming,

The instructions aren't quite so bad any more (see
https://dev.launchpad.net/Running). I've run Debian PPAs locally. It's
still not trivial to install on Debian, but it's close. Getting from a
running development Launchpad instance to one that can build packages is
also a reasonably well documented process
(https://dev.launchpad.net/Soyuz/HowToUseSoyuzLocally)

> much like I initially ran away screaming when I
> started fiddling with Sourceforge.  It took several years (and two
> forks/renamings) to have *Forge packages that can actually be installed
> with a reasonably low effort.
> 
>   Also, still according to Jonathan, there are several people working
> full-time on Launchpad sysadmin at Canonical.  We at Debian don't have
> that kind of resources.

Well, those few sysadmins manage Launchpad, Landscape, Ubuntu One and
some other internal applications. And you wouldn't want or need to run
all of Launchpad's services.

> > It does require some changes to work with Debian's suites, but that
> > would be far easier than reimplementing all the functionality yourself.
> 
>   Given the above, I strongly doubt that.  Adding PPA-like functionality
> to FusionForge *might* be easier, since we already have Alioth, but even
> that would be a significant amount of work, if only to setup the
> build-daemons for that new service.

Getting a local Launchpad instance to build Debian PPAs isn't hard. I
did it in an afternoon last year as an experiment. Setting it up in
production is a little harder, sure.

William
(Launchpad contributor, normally hacking on PPAs... I don't think I'm
entirely mad yet)

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