laborious to rebuild one source package into multiple distroseries
Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Launchpad itself |
Expired
|
Low
|
Unassigned |
Bug Description
A very useful feature would be a way to copy all packages within a ppa to a new series.
Currently this is not possible, because it is not allowed to have two packages with the same name and version string in one ppa. When you try to use the 'copy packages' feature to copy your packages within the same PPA, you get an error: "The following source cannot be copied: prog 1.2.1-ppa1 in natty (same version already has published binaries in the destination archive). "
As a result, every time a package maintainer wants to support a new ubuntu version, they either have to download, rename version, and re-upload all packages. Alternatively, a seperate ppa respository can be created for every series and Launchpad's 'copy packages' features can be used without conflict. Both are not optimal...
A very simple fix would be to have launchpad postfix the version string with the series name. E.g. prog-1.2.1 -> prog-1.2.1~lucid0. This could happen either during the copy, or by default for every package that is uploaded.
Either way it seems that it would become a lot easier to support multiple Ubuntu series if packages could simply be build for multiple series at once, without having to rename and reupload every package 6 times, one for every supported ubuntu series.
This is possibly a dupe; at least it's something people often hit.
This has sometimes previously been answered with "this behaviour is by design", but I think it really is a user-affecting problem and at least in principle Launchpad could increment the version as you suggest.