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Ravan
Asked: 2015-11-14 18:14:21 +0800 CST

Is there any limit to the number of PPA's I can add to the system? Why?

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I came across a post which suggests:

Do Not instruct people to add PPAs unless it is necessary

And one of the reason it has mentioned:

There is a finite number of PPAs that a user can add.

Really?

Is there any limit to adding PPA's to the system? Why?

Also, on what factors do the limit depend?

ppa

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    I'm not aware of a number limit, but I do know that as you add more PPAs, you get more twisted and twisted dependency chains and PPAs can/will begin to conflict with each other.

    You should only add a PPA if you really need/want what's in it. I, for example, have the webupd8 PPA for ST and a couple of other things, X-Swat, and Kernel edgers.

    If someone knows of a numerical hard limit, that would be good to know, but this is the reasoning on why I personally limit myself to a few PPAs.

    Edit
    Evidently there is a hard limit related to GPG keys, and it is being worked on.

    Excerpt:
    There is a neat way to squeeze couple of PPAs more through this keyhole of 40...
    Look into /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d and You might find some pairs or triples of same size. Check them with diff and if they are same You can leave only one...

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  2. Just to augument the answer given already with example. Suppose you installed A on ppa X. A depends on library libgit2 version 1 and won't work with 2. You install B from ppa Y and upgrades libgit2 to version 2 somehow. You have just screwed app A.

    That is simple example but with interdependence web in Ubuntu packages you might end up with dead system. So be careful with PPAs

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