PPA "Copy packages" issues

[Celso Providelo]

On Tue, Aug 19, 2008 at 4:36 PM, Mackenzie Morgan <macoafi at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 19, 2008 at 3:30 PM, Bruce Cowan
> <lists at bcowan.fastmail.co.uk> wrote:
>> I'm having trouble using the PPA "copy packages" facility. I am trying
>> to use it to copy packages from one release to another (Hardy->Intrepid
>> and vice-versa). When I try to do this, I get an error - "same version
>> already has published binaries in the destination archive". The only way
>> I can copy packages is to copy the binaries.
>>
>> Is this a bug, or am I doing something wrong?
>
> Known bug.  It was mentioned back when the feature was added, but no
> further discussion that I'm aware of.

It's definitely not a bug.

You cannot sanely distribute the same binary version built in
different contexts (series), thus you cannot copy only the source to
be rebuilt in another series. The publisher won't be able to place the
new binaries in the pool/ directory and APT won't be able to do the
right thing when installing it or upgrading the system.

Assuming that the tool-chain and most of the libraries are
backward-compatible, the vast majority of binaries can be safely
copied from an older series to a new series without any problem
(that's basically what happens when we open a new distroseries).

For the cases when you really need to rebuild the source in the new
series context it needs almost certainly also needs tweaks in the
build-dependencies directives, so, if that's true, a new source
version is the only way to go.

Admittedly, there is yet the bin-NMU (read it simple binary rebuild)
use-case would avoid multiple mechanic re-uploads, but this is
something that wasn't implemented yet for ubuntu and is being
discussed for very specific scenarios, not as a general solution for
shipping binary rebuilds in different series.

Does it help to contextualize the mentioned error ?

[]
-- 
Celso Providelo <celso.providelo at canonical.com>
IRC: cprov, Jabber: cprov at jabber.org, Skype: cprovidelo
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