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ACTION: Back up old sources from PPAs

· By Jonathan Lange · In General

Now that I have your attention…

We’ve been overwhelmed by the popularity of PPAs on Launchpad. In fact, according to our sysadmins, they are a little too popular and now our disks are full.

Full disks mean no more PPAs, and no more uploads to PPAs. We’d like to add some more disks, but we can’t actually do that soon enough for a bunch of complicated reasons.

Instead, we’ve decided that we’re going to remove all of the source files for any uploads that are:

  • in PPAs
  • not published, that is, deleted or superseded
  • have been not published for over seven days

Note that we already delete the binaries for such uploads.

We are going to delete these old files this Wednesday, January 27th. We’re really sorry that we are announcing it so close to the actual event — we know it’s a hassle.

If you want to keep any of these files, you are going to have to download them right now. Here’s how to do it.

  1. Go to your PPA’s web page on Launchpad and click on “View package details”.
  2. Change the filter to search for “Any status”. Click “Filter”.
  3. For each superseded or deleted upload with files you want to save, expand the upload and manually save all the files under the “Package files” heading.

If it’s a busy PPA like the example one, then there will be a lot of old versions to download. If you aren’t sure, you probably won’t need all of them. Ask on #launchpad on Freenode or the launchpad-users mailing list if you are unsure.