Cleaning up old and unused PPAs from "Snappy Developers"

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In the course of cleaning up old cruft from our infrastructure i’m going over the list of different PPAs that piled up under the Snappy Developers team over time. Some are essential, but many are old and have not been touched since ages. Before removing them i want to give potential users the opportunity to speak up. The list of PPAs i want to remove is:

If you or your team uses one of these PPAs please speak up, i intend to start the deletion during the next week.

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Can we change the names of those PPAs to include DEPRECATED - WILL REMOVE SOON (%orig)? This will help with visually inspecting what will remain and what will go.

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even if they are gone next week anyway ?

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Yes, more people might notice that than this post

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done … didnt really improve the readability of the overview though …

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This page Snappy Developers in Launchpad looks much better now. Thank you @ogra :slight_smile:

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TL;DR: Please don’t remove ppa:snappy-dev/ubuntu/{tools,tools-proposed} without coordinating with the Launchpad team and nominating a replacement. At present, if these PPAs are removed, then all snap builds on LP will immediately start failing. My preference would be to keep these in place at least until 15.04 builds are no longer necessary.

When Launchpad is building a snap, as for any of its other build types, it assembles a sources.list for the build, which consists of various suites in the Ubuntu primary archive as well as any PPAs nominated for the build. Snap builds have an additional wrinkle compared to other builds: because we wanted to be able to arrange for all snap builds in a series to have a minimum baseline version of snapcraft that was newer than what was available in the primary archive (this was particularly important before snapcraft started being available in the primary archive), we have a configuration item as follows:

tools_source: deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/snappy-dev/tools/ubuntu %(series)s main

(Similarly for staging, but tools-proposed in that case. We used to use this to test the effect of new snapcraft versions on LP builds, but nowadays it’s probably easier to do this by just telling individual builds to use a particular PPA.)

Now, this facility has been mostly unused since xenial, but as you can see the configuration entry is series-independent, so we need to have a single PPA that works for all series even if it’s empty for newer ones. It would be reasonable for you to say that we no longer need the ability to provide a newer baseline version of snapcraft since it’s being regularly SRUed, but let’s please keep these PPAs in place until 15.04 is decommissioned entirely.

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