I have been wanting TED to have a PPA for a while and given that I now have some free time I thought I might as well give it a go.

However, I didn't want to do this until I got some sort of authorisation from the community.

Plan
1. Create Launchpad project.
2. Package 32-bit and 64-bit for x86 architectures (this is all I can test!) that work seemlessly with Ubuntu. May be able to test more with VMs but unsure at the moment.
3. Maintain and update TED through this system. Pushing bug reports back upstream to here once they have been filtered/analysed first.

Benefits
1. Greater acceptance by Ubuntu users as TED becomes as easy to install and use as any other app.
2. More stable TED on Ubuntu as releases are tested specifically for the platform before release.
3. Fewer inane bug reports appear here as they are filtered through the normal Launchpad bug reporting system. Bug reports coming from Ubuntu (through this system) are also more likely to come with possible patches as bugs would be analysed before being pushed upstream (to you here!).

Issues
1. Further man power required to maintain, test and update the packages.
2. Possible distraction that draws away from the cross platform compatibility.

Any thoughts and comments would be useful.
I won't start until I get the OK from the community.

Sorry to be so ignorant but what is a PPA?

Effectively, I'm asking whether it would be OK to set up an Ubuntu repository so people can download a nicely managed ".deb" (Ubuntu installer) instead of needing to download the ted.jar and then create their own scripts to run it nicely within Ubuntu.

Creating a repository via Launchpad instead of just creating the packages would also give us some nice features such as bug reports and an easy O/S managed way to push upgrades.

great idea, I look forward to the PPA