[OpenAFS] Re: Ubuntu

[Sergio Gelato]

* Russ Allbery [2012-04-04 10:02:28 -0700]:
> Jeffrey Altman <jaltman@your-file-system.com> writes:
> > On 4/3/2012 10:04 PM, Ken Elkabany wrote:
> 
> >> 1.6.0pre1 which was packaged with Ubuntu 11.10. Should we make it a
> >> priority to upgrade?
> 
> > 1.6.0pre1 is not an official OpenAFS release.  It was a tagged
> > pre-release.  Anyone that deploys pre-releases should be prepared to
> > upgrade as each new pre-release and the final release are issued.
[...] 
> However, for packages not independently maintained in Ubuntu, Ubuntu pulls
> versions from Debian unstable and then just freezes with whatever they
> happened to have at the time.  This means that they can end up with some
> really unfortunate choices in their releases.
> 
> I'm not sure there's any really good way to fix this, given that I don't
> track Ubuntu's release cycle (or use it at all myself).

My reading of the Ubuntu wiki is that for serious bugs like the ones in
1.6.0pre1 one can apply for a Stable Release Update.

The backports mechanism doesn't really cut it in the general case, since
the version to be backported must already be present in some other release
of Ubuntu. That leaves PPAs (in the sense of third-party repositories of
Ubuntu packages).

What I usually do is take your Debian source packages and backport them
myself to the Ubuntu releases I wish to support (mostly only the LTS
ones). This rarely[*] requires more than a simple run through pbuilder
(after adding a suitable ~suffix to the package version string) so I'm
not sure there is much to be gained by pooling efforts in this area.

[*] Just tried it on 1.6.1-1 and found I needed to undo the debhelper V9
update (or upgrade debhelper in my pbuilders). Easy enough with a peek 
at the git repository.