Ubuntu – How to transition PPA users from one PPA to another

PHPppa

I need to transition existing users from one PPA(s) to different PPA, so this is a question how to automate the transition with as little impact on the users as possible.

More precisely:

I have PPAs for PHP 5.5 and PHP 5.6 that use old style PHP packaging that was used pre-Xenial and they have a quite a lot of users.

Now I made a new PPA that includes PHP 5.5, PHP 5.6 and PHP 7.0 and I would the users of old PPAs to switch to this new PPA. I have a couple of ideas how to do this general, but I would like to have more input from the Ask Ubuntu community.

Please contribute your thoughts via comments, direct edits to the answers below or add your own suggestion.

Best Answer

Option 3 -- Automatically add the new PPA

This is like 2, but php5-common would automatically add the new PPA, so the new packages would be available after next apt-get update run. Optionally there could be a Debconf question whether the users wants the PPA added automatically or they will do so themselves.

  • Pros:
    1. One single repository to handle
    2. No automatic transition
    3. Users can prepare their transition plan
    4. Packages are ready to be installed right away
    5. Adding PPA from same namespace might work flawlessly
  • Cons:
    1. Some users will miss the announcement no matter how hard you try
    2. Adding extra PPA automatically seems like security risk
    3. Adding extra PPA from different namespace needs dropping extra GPG keys in /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/ and that also seems like security risk
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