There are two ways to initialise a new series:
- A continuation of a distribution with existing series. For example,
after the previous series was released you might want to open a new
development series by copying the previous one.
- A derived distribution series. This is where you have a new
distribution and you want to copy the packages from a series in a
different distribution.
In both cases, initialisation is done as a background task after the
"Initialize Series" button is pressed.
Continuation series
This will copy all the sources and binaries from the previous
series in the distribution. Its parent series default to the
parent series used in the previous series, but they can be changed.
This is useful, for example, when the new series has a longer
support period and you wish to sync packages from a more stable
upstream series. On an Ubuntu-sized distribution,
expect the background task to complete in around 10 minutes.
It will also copy all of the settings from the previous series,
such as upload permissions and packagesets.
New derived distribution series
Initializing a new distribution is a complicated task. It takes a
long time and has a lot of checks. There are various things that
you need to specify:
- One or more parents to inherit packages from.
- Which architectures available in parents that you want to use.
- Which packagesets you want to copy from the parents.
- Whether to rebuild the copied packages,
or copy binaries from the parents.
Normally you can expect the initialisation to complete in minutes
if you have less than around 1000 packages, but it will non-linearly
increase as the number of copied packages increases, because it has
to check that you are not copying conflicting packages.
Pre-initialisation checks and errors
- Parent Builds: If the parent has any builds in
progress for sources that you are copying,
the initialisation will be refused. This is to stop you ending
up with the same version binary with contents that differ between
parent and child, because the child would rebuild a source
that didn't get its binary copied too.
- Pending (Queued) Parent Builds: If the parent has any
builds for sources that you are copying that are waiting in the
pending-acceptance queues (pending archive admin action),
the initialisation will be refused for the same reasons as
copying "Parent Builds" above.