Comment 3 for bug 316858

On Tue, 2009-01-13 at 19:57 +0000, Celso Providelo wrote:
> Ted, all binaries ever built in the PPA context are available for
> download directly from LP (librarian) in the PPA page. Although
> only the latest binary versions are available in the repository.
> Let me know if mitigates your problem, or do we need to investigate
> other alternative.

Well, see, I didn't know this. But, I think that's part of the problem.
I know how to use synaptic to select which version of a package I'm
using. I think that's the case for most users.

> I can foresee that keeping old binary versions available in the
> repository tends to increase disk-usage a lot and makes gardening
> more complicated. Comparing `apt-get install foo-bin=1.0` and
> going to the PPA page and click on a link to install the via gebi,
> I can't see a big advantage in the former.

I think there are a few reasons this is still important. Most of the
tools that can install single debs reasonably are command line. Users
should never have to use the command line (I'm a big fan of not shipping
gnome-terminal with Ubuntu). Secondly, by using apt and with the signed
PPAs in the future there is less of a chance of man-in-the-middle
attacks (not huge, but not unreasonble).

In general, I think that if we're already storing the binaries, making
them available to APT isn't such a huge cost and it does have a real
benefit to users.