Launchpad now offers bug tracking for personal package archives (PPAs), making it easier for users to report issues specific to software within a PPA.
Why does that matter? Well, not all PPAs are maintained by their upstream counterparts – folks who, frankly, aren’t always minded to care about quirks in their software that might be down to someone else’s packaging methods.
Plus, PPAs are often used to provide newer or experimental versions of software that the version in the standard Ubuntu repositories, and different PPAs can distribute different versions of the same software.
With the new tracking support, users can finally problems against the packages they’ve installed from that PPA. Bugs can be about the PPA a whole, an individual source package within it or a build for a specific Ubuntu version.
Canonical’s İlker Emre Koç illustrated the benefit in an announcement.
A user installs a newer version of Example Editor from a testing PPA, then encounters a crash. Rather than report an issue against the package, which would imply the version in the Ubuntu repos is affected, it can now be filed against the version in the testing PPA.
For software developers who use PPAs to distribute their own software and for maintainers packaging other people’s software, this long-awaited ability should reduce the burden of triaging and fixing bugs.
PPA bug tracking is live on Launchpad. Developers can head to their PPA and select View bugs to explore the features available – as can users who want report something’s askew.
In other Launchpad news, the code-hosting site is retiring its blueprints feature at the end of the 27.10 cycle (so not for another year) due to low usage. It’s also mulling the creation of a ‘modern, purpose-built translation platform’ on top of Launchpad.