I feel that having at least two active maintainers is a goal to aim for, for redundancy but also to avoid fatigue, frustration etc.
With that said, this topic's purpose will be to coordinate actions on the multiple PPAs managed by the FreeCAD maintainers team. Work is prioritized toward the "official" 0.16 release. Done, work is now focused on reactivating the Daily Builds PPA.
(Updated Sun, 01 May 2016 15:47:19 -0400)
- Update the Vcs links in the various branch's debian/control files. Note: see item 10. (done)
- Update the dependencies in the control files. libsoqt4-dev isn't required but it does pull in some dependencies that are. (DONE)
- Update oce to 0.17.1 for the 0.16 release by backporting the xenial package. (DONE)
- Upload first on the OCE Releases PPA. Done for precise, trusty and wily. vivid not done because it reached EOL in February.
- Copy the binaries to the FreeCAD Stable Releases PPA. Done for precise, trusty and wily. vivid excluded for the same reason as above.
- Copy the binaries to the FreeCAD Daily Builds PPA. precise, trusty & wily packages copied - DONE
- Updating netgen. Completing 3 is required as netgen builds against oce. (DONE)
- Upload the packages to the Stable PPA for precise, trusty and wily. DONE
- Copy the binaries to the Daily PPA for precise, trusty and wily. DONE.
- Backporting calculix 2.9 from xenial. Make sure the old ccx 2.7 package gets removed from the user's system. (DONE)
- Upload the packages to the Stable PPA for precise, trusty and wily. DONE
- Copy the binaries to the Daily PPA. DONE
- Fix the freecad-doc package which is empty at the moment. (DONE)
- Find a workaround in xenial for liboce-visualization-dev not linking libfreeimage-dev properly. It's a Multi-Arch support issue. This prevents FreeCAD from building on the Daily PPA thus we have the same problem with the 0.16 release. (DONE thanks to f3nix/Mateusz)
- Provide 0.16 release packages on the Stable Releases PPA. This is priority #1 in the list, but it depends on items 1-7 being completed first. Item 7 completion is not required to build precise, trusty & wily packages. The issue with xenial can be postponed but not for too long, 16.04 release date is April 21st. (COMPLETED ON 2016-04-19, release update uploaded on 2016-04-28)
- If no solution is found for 7, uploading an "improper" xenial 0.16 package, probably like the official ubuntu package as a work around until an upstream fix. No longer necessary
- Streamline the Daily Builds PPA process. Currently there are many packaging branches and build recipes (some of them obsolete). It may be possible to use a single packaging branch and a single build recipe with a properly tailored debian/control file (item 2). We'll know more after completing 8. (in progress)
- Split package into smaller ones (issue #857) --> goal for 0.17? (needs to be discussed with developers and other maintainers)
- Document on the wiki what we do.
- Look into the possibility of producing a self contained snapshot (like Windows pre-release builds), or making it possible to install the 0.16 release and the daily build at the same time. The 0.17 development cycle will bring disruptive changes that may come very soon. It's possible the daily builds will become less stable/usable for at least some time, on the other hand wider user feedback will be useful. (forum discussion) (second solution in progress)