(dropping linaro-kernel@)
On Thu, Jan 26, 2012, Dave Martin wrote:
deb http://ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports precise main deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/linaro-maintainers/overlay linaro-12.02 main
And http://ppa.launchpad.net/linaro-maintainers/overlay/ubuntu/dists/linaro-12.0... and the things it points to would then be authoritative definition of what was in that release for evermore (or at least, the GPL-requisite 3 years).
[...]
Do you know if this is sensible/doable, or is launchpad very tied the ubuntu release names?
It's not possible with the current web UI of PPAs, but the Launchpad code is flexible in this area and it would likely be possible to do things like that, albeit it would be a bit weird to combine "distros" together (precise from Ubuntu with linaro-12.02 from Linaro). Launchpad gained over the last year improved support for "derivatives" but that means "forking" Ubuntu for Linaro and then constantly merging from it, having our own archive etc.; the only entry would be: deb http://archive.linaro.org linaro-12.02 main
This is something we envisioned doing in the early stages of Linaro, but Launchpad wasn't ready and it was costly to maintain, now it would be costly to switch; perhaps the incentive is strong enough though.
Another way to solve this could be to defer to some automated service for publishing our bits rather than uploading them ourselves; for instance we would point a robot at the git repo where the TI LT kernel for release is kept, and it would be assembling a source package from it and publishing that to some Vcs and to the release PPA. That way we would ensure we always now where we took the source from, how it was built etc. and can enforce any rule we like. This would be comparable to the automated merges of some bzr branches in Launchpad where a robot tries running the testsuite and then merges the branch in tip if that passes, but humans never push to tip.
Availibility of the original (git or not) source is a long standing problem which is partly due to the PPA rules (which are dropping some sources after being superseded for a while) and partly to relying on humans to document things like Vcs-Git properly.