ACTION: Back up old sources from PPAs

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  • not published, that is, deleted or superseded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 For each superseded or deleted upload with files you want to save, expand the upload and manually save all the files under the “Package files” heading.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.

4 Responses to “ACTION: Back up old sources from PPAs”

  1. vivalostioz Says:

    Well, it would be great if I could delete my PPAs myself. I set up 2 PPAs but one of them accidentily…

  2. Andy Says:

    I don’t understand how this effects the service of PPAs. Should regular users be worried? When are you guys going to add new disks to the server? I’m surprised more hasn’t been planned on the future of PPAs since they seem to be such an amazing and simple way for developers to “release early, release often”. Plus, with so many users obsessed with keeping up-to-date with software, this is a brand new era for Linux users without the ‘download > click > click > click’ cyclical hell that Microsoft imposes.

    Keep on rocking Launchpad. I love your PPA service.

  3. Julian Edwards Says:

    For the most part you won’t notice any change in service to PPAs and most users will not be worried at all.

    The only people who need to be concerned are the ones who rely on Launchpad keep old source packages around forever. They will now only stay around for 7 days or so once the package is deleted or superseded.

    Note that Launchpad keeps a copy of the files you uploaded separate to the ones published in the repository at ppa.launchpad.net – when we talk about old sources in this context, we mean the ones available via the Launchpad.net pages.

    Thanks for the nice words about PPAs!

  4. Julian Edwards Says:

    By the way, we most certainly are planning more for PPAs! See here:

    https://dev.launchpad.net/BuildBranchToArchive

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