Announcement: Ubuntu prerelease packages available

Dear all,

I have now finalised the svn update automation system for my official
packages, and consequently Ubuntu preview packages are available. The
current revision is r1229, and it is, at the time of going to press,
only available for Ubuntu 8.10: (the main repository for) 8.04 does
not contain a recent enough version of Qt4. I am working to upload a
new Qt4 as I write.

The packages are built identically to those found in the Ubuntu and
Debian official archives, and thus have the same advantages and
drawbacks: they produce smaller binaries (no linked-in soundfonts or
images, etc), and work around pulseaudio, but also do not support the
QtScript framework yet, nor the awl library, and for distributability
reasons, the handbook PDFs are not currently included. However, all
other functionality remains, and these issues should not hinder
typical use.

Packages are to be found in the PPA detailed at the link below:

https://launchpad.net/~mscore-ubuntu/+archive

Debian unstable packages should follow shortly, and these will be
hosted in a repository on prereleases.musescore.org, as Debian to my
knowledge does not provide a system comparable to the Ubuntu PPAs.

If anyone wishes to contribute to the packaging, the most recent
sources are always available at the bzr branch detailed below:

https://code.launchpad.net/~mscore-ubuntu/musescore/debian
(lp:~mscore-ubuntu/musescore/debian)

Finally, if anyone wishes to contribute in a non-technical way to the
packaging, upgraded hosting (dedicated or virtual) for
prereleases.musescore.org would be much appreciated to enable
prereleases across architectures that are not Ubuntu to be
automatically built and made available every night.

Thank you,

Toby