Y PPA Manager 0.0.9.2 Released With New Features

Y PPA Manager, like the name says, is a tool to manage PPAs: add, remove, purge PPAs, search for packages in Launchpad PPAs, list packages in a PPA and lots more, all from a single user interface. For a complete feature list, see the Y PPA Manager Launchpad page.

Today I'm releasing Y PPA Manager 0.0.9.2, which comes with new features and many under the hood changes:

• Transient notifications for GNOME Shell
• Initial support for Launchpad PPAs (only Launchpad!) added to /etc/apt/sources.list instead of /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ (experimental). Note: the duplicate PPAs removal, "Re-enable working PPAs after Ubuntu upgrade" and "Update release name in working PPAs" features don't yet support this.
• Some features like Remove PPA, Purge PPA or List Packages in PPAs have been merged into a single "Manage PPAs" dialog. Also, in this dialog, the PPA name is now displayed (e.g.: ppa:webupd8team/gthumb) instead of the PPA .list file name
• Manage PPAs: new option to view/edit the .list source file
• Manage PPAs: new option to update a single PPA. This was already implemented in Y PPA Manager and was used when adding a PPA, but there wasn't a GUI implementation to manually update single PPAs.
• Many "update-ppa" improvements (this is the command line tool used to update single PPAs; use "update-ppa --help for more info), including a fix for Linux Mint or support for more repository formats, e.g. "update-ppa http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu quantal main".

Also, Policykit (pkexec) is now used instead of gksu / kdesu for Ubuntu versions newer than 11.04. This brings consistency between desktop environments and for example, you get a native password dialog in GNOME Shell. With this change, you only have to enter the root password when you start Y PPA Manager and you won't be prompted each time you want to perform an action.

A complete list of changes can be found at Launchpad.

I have to thank Satya for his help with this release: he's the one who has implemented "update-ppa" to update single PPAs and he's also implemented most of the gksu to pkexec transition, along with bug fixes, testing and more.

Install Y PPA Manager

Ubuntu / Linux Mint users can install Y PPA Manager using the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/y-ppa-manager
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install y-ppa-manager

Because of the many changes in this release, you may find more bugs than usual - remember to report them @ Launchpad!