Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 27th Nov 2007 21:09 UTC, submitted by diegocg
Canonical is announcing the availability of PPA: a Launchpad-integrated free service which allows anyone to get 1 GB of space to upload whatever software they want. Launchpad will compile it automatically and will set up an apt repository with your package to anyone who wants to use it. Aditionally, PPAs offer bug reporting and translation services.
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Member since:
2006-01-01
Ubuntu has done a lot to encourage unofficial ("community") contributions. This has some obvious advantages. Canonical (Shuttleworth) saves money when volunteers do a lot of work in Ubuntu. Also, making contributions easy fits well together with the FOSS spirit and participation makes the community stronger and more motivated.
However, I agree with AdamW's critique. Unofficial, unsupported packages can easily create problems because of their lack of proper quality assurance -- and apparently such problems already exist in Ubuntu. The "universe" package repository is only maintained by the community, which means: no official quality control, no official bug-fixes, and no official security updates. Leaving the "universe" repo without official support is the most likely cause for the many upgrade problems that users have experienced in Ubuntu:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=285446
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=414935
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=580852
I'm not sure if saving money in support is really the wisest thing to do in the long run. Ubuntu hasn't even proven yet that they can provide a safe and trouble-free upgrade path from their Long Term Support edition to the next LTS release. If their LTS releases turn out to have upgrade problems, that will be seen as a huge disadvantage from the point of view of potential enterprise users -- and that's where the big money is. Making even more unsupported packages available sounds to me like a bad business plan.