Ubuntu PPA changes

Olly Betts olly at survex.com
Fri Aug 23 05:32:01 BST 2019


I've created a new PPA in which to maintain the backported versions of
the latest Debian packages to Ubuntu releases:

https://launchpad.net/~xapian/+archive/ubuntu/backports

The reason for this change is that the existing PPA is stuck using a
GPG key created when the PPA was first created a decade ago.  This
is a 1024 bit RSA key using SHA1 as the hash, and that's not really
secure by modern standards.

Sadly Launchpad doesn't provide a way to generate a new key for an
existing PPA.  And worse, once a user or team has a PPA key it gets
reused for new PPAs under that user or team (even if you delete all
PPAs before creating a new one):

https://bugs.launchpad.net/launchpad/+bug/1331914
https://bugs.launchpad.net/launchpad/+bug/1700167

There's no indication that these problems are going to get fixed any
time soon, so I've had to create a new "xapian" team to work around
them.

To switch a machine using the existing PPA to use the new PPA you can
run these commands:

sudo add-apt-repository --remove ppa:xapian-backports/ppa
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:xapian/backports
sudo apt-get update

To show this is a genuine change I've added a link to the new PPA in
the description of the old one at:
https://launchpad.net/~xapian-backports/+archive/ubuntu/ppa
Also this message is also GPG signed with my personal GPG key.

I've also updated the download page on the website.

I've also deleted the "xapian-1.2" PPA which contained packages of
Xapian 1.2.x for precise and trusty.  We closed the 1.2 release series
more than 3 years ago, precise reached end of life more than two years
ago and trusty nearly four months ago.

Cheers,
    Olly
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