What has happened to http://ppa.launchpad.net/accessibility-dev/ppa/ubuntu

It seems that the PPA (or even the whole user account) has been removed.

This is one of the risks that you run when using a PPA. The provider of the PPA is free to remove software from it or delete the whole PPA.

No official software should depend on a P(rivate) P(ackage) A(rchive) - note the word private.

What was the list of packages that you installed from this one?
Maybe the packages are available in the official repositories or other PPAs?

While I generally agree with the above, please note that the first P in PPA stands for Personal, not Private.

Hi Manfred and Colin,

Thank you for your replies.

1) How do I find out what, if anything, has been installed from this PPA.

2) How do I find out who was responsible for this PPA so that I can get an archive copy to support the systems that I have that used it.

As stated in the question, it is required for Ubuntu-Mate 14.04 LTS (a unofficial LTS provided by the Ubuntu-Mate team before they managed to create an official version - Ubuntu-Mate 16.04 LTS).

As the maintainers for this distribution have not yet taken any actions to sort out the loss of this PPA, I am looking to find out what can be done to handle the issues.

I have several system that use this distribution so some help in sorting out the mess that has resulted from the loss of this PPA will be mush appreciated.

Upgrading to Ubuntu-Mate 16.04 LTS broke the boot functionality on one of the systems completely and I had to revert to backup so this is a last resort option at this point in time.

As far as I know the information from which source (e.g. PPA) a package was installed can be displayed with synaptic package management program.

I ended up using 'dpkg -l' and 'apt-cache showpkg' to identify the source packages for most of the affected systems.

I will need source code for the following packages/versions from the no-longer existing ppa:
at-spi2-core : 2.20.2-1ubuntu2~trusty1
gir1.2-atk-1.0 : 2.18.0-0ubuntu1~trusty1
gir1.2-atspi-2.0 : 2.20.2-1ubuntu2~trusty1
gnome-orca : 3.20.2-1ubuntu3~trusty1
libatk-adaptor : 2.18.1-0ubuntu1~trusty1
libatk-bridge2.0-0 : 2.18.1-0ubuntu1~trusty1
libatk1.0-0 : 2.18.0-0ubuntu1~trusty1
libatk1.0-data : 2.18.0-0ubuntu1~trusty1
libatspi2.0-0 : 2.20.2-1ubuntu2~trusty1
python3-pyatspi : 2.18.0+dfsg-0ubuntu1~trusty1

The uBuntu 14.04 LTS versions are different so I would need source code to find out what the changes are, which is no longer available as the ppa is no more, in order to see what issues will be created by getting the uBuntu 14.04 LTS versions.

If you look in the directory /var/cache/apt/archives/ on one of your system, you might find the deb files of these packages.

As an emergency recovery mechanism, it currently happens that you should be able to retrieve these files manually from one of our old development instances:

  https://qastaging.launchpad.net/~accessibility-dev/+archive/ubuntu/ppa/+packages

However, this is *not* something we support or that you can rely on continuing to exist, so you need to take steps to migrate away from this urgently once you've done initial basic recovery. (To reiterate, in general Launchpad only provides hosting for PPAs, and it's up to the owners of those PPAs whether they want them to continue to exist.)

Ah, hm, those files actually seem to return 404 there, presumably because they've been garbage-collected from our main file storage system. I'm sorry, but I don't think we're in a position to help you. My best suggestion would be for you to ask on https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/Ubuntu-accessibility to see if anyone there has copies of the files you need.

The qastaging server that Colin Watson mentioned show that the packages were uploaded by https://launchpad.net/~themuso
Maybe he can provide some answers.