We launched (forgive the pun) the SFTP service to upload packages securely to Ubuntu and PPAs a few months ago, but I’m not seeing much use of it. I would really appreciate it if more people would give it a go!
It also has the bonus that it doesn’t suffer from the bug where uploads sometimes hang with 1k to go, as on the regular FTP server.
Configure your dput.cf with these changes for Ubuntu:
method = sftp incoming = ubuntu/ login = <your LP account name here>
For PPAs it’s similar, just make sure your fqdn and incoming are set appropriately.
Let me know in the comments how you get on.
Looking at my PPA pages I see that SFTP is not mentioned anywhere, so most of the people can’t know that Launchpad supports it. Also, I (and I suppose many other users too) have no idea how to configure SFTP for PPAs without spending a minute reading the docs.
I think however that SFTP is great and, in my opinion, dput itself should be changed to use it by default when/if supported by the host.
Hi Andrea, thanks for the comment. The SFTP method is documented in the https://help.launchpad.net/Packaging/PPA/Uploading page.
All the dailies i submit in my dozen of PPAs are now done using sftp
(incl. chromium, firefox, thunderbird, network-manager, gwibber…).
Something like 25 packages x 5 dists almost everyday, that’s a lot of data.
You should see it.
What i miss it the progress indicator. Esp for big packages like chromium.
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