I'd like to get all of your opinion on the PPA that we've built to help Cassandra users on Ubuntu.
PPA stands for Personal Package Archive, and it is a system for building small apt repositories that users can easily add to their systems. As Eric Evans noted on IRC today, most users will be fine just pointing at the apache repository and installing cassandra from there. The only reason we've chosen to build a PPA is the continuously changing nature not only that Cassandra has, but Ubuntu as well. While we try to stay as close to Debian as possible, its entirely possible we'll break with Debian for a release, and we'd like to make sure our users are able to run and/or rebuild the latest packages on their systems. Likewise there may be other complementary packages like thrift that are not in apache's repository, that we can add to this one. We're basically just taking the debian source packages you're already putting out, and rebuilding it on top of Ubuntu releases. The focus of this is to help users reduce the amount of manual building/packaging/script writing they have need to do to get up and running and keep current. While we won't be able to offer the level of support that we do for packages in main, we're hoping that by staying as close as possible to your upstream releases we can help you support these users as well. So, I hope you will find it useful to point Ubuntu users here: https://launchpad.net/~cassandra-ubuntu/+archive/stable I welcome your comments! -Clint
