Need for stable PPA releases

Asked by follower

I'm working on creating a reproducible build environment for an ARM target using a combination of VirtualBox, Ubuntu, Vagrant and Ansible.

I'm using the PPA at https://launchpad.net/~terry.guo/+archive/ubuntu/gcc-arm-embedded as the source for packages.

However, I've just encountered an issue with using the PPA.

I was installing `gcc-arm-none-eabi` version `4.9.3.2015q1-0trusty13` but as of a few minutes ago that was made unavailable due to being "Superseded on 2015-06-24 by gcc-arm-none-eabi - 4.9.3.2015q2-1trusty1".

It seems that each package is removed when a new quarterly release is made--this will make it very difficult to create a reproducible "known good" build environment via the PPA.

It seems like the older non-packaged releases are kept for download via https://launchpad.net/gcc-arm-embedded/+download, is there any reason why older releases couldn't be kept for packaged releases also? Or at least some subset defined as "stable"--e.g. a gcc point-release. I'd rather use a packaged release if possible.

Obviously another option is to keep a copy of the package file in a repository but that's what I'm trying to avoid doing in the first place.

Thanks.

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Thomas Preud'homme (thomas-preudhomme) said :
#1

Hi follower,

This is for technical limitation that only one version of a package is provided. APT repositories (which PPA are) only allow one version of a given package name per "distribution". A distribtion is something like "precise" or "utopic" ie one release of Ubuntu. There is an ongoing work to make our PPA closer to the package provided in official Debian and thus Ubuntu repositories. All versions uploaded to Debian are archived on snapshot.debian.org so eventually you'll have stability there if needed. I'm aware that right now the official Debian and Ubuntu package lag behind but that should be fixed soon (a matter of days, maybe a few weeks I think).

However, I think the best approach is for you to save all the environment instead of relying on stable environment behing available. At last, note that update release normally only contain bug fixes and occasionally support for new processor so the code generation for a given processor should not change in update release. Only major release should lead to different code generation. It would be theoretically possible to provide in parallel toolchains for two differents major versions (say 4.8 and 4.9) but it's a bit more effort so we decided not to do it for now.

Best regards.

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