I've a package named Artha which I distribute as source and (deb) binaries for x86 and x86_64 architectures i.e. I've the experience in making deb files. I got quite a few requests for setting up a PPA. I thought I'll do it for the upcoming release. Artha in Ubuntu's repository is of version 1.0.2 and I'm trying to create a PPA for Artha 1.0.3.
I read Launchpad's Personal Package Archive
docs, and the PPA is now set up, but this page on versioning says that for a package like Artha which is already in Ubuntu's repos, named artha-1.0.2-1ubuntu1
the PPA version should be artha-1.0.3-1ubuntu1ppa1
, so that when Ubuntu's repos update to 1.0.3 of Artha, it supersedes my PPA's package.
When I usually make my .deb package, I get these files
- artha_1.0.3.orig.tar.bz2
- artha_1.0.3-1.debian.tar.gz
- artha_1.0.3-1.dsc
- artha_1.0.3-1_amd64.build
- artha_1.0.3-1_amd64.changes
- artha_1.0.3-1_amd64.deb
and their equivalents for i386. This page on uploading to a PPA says that the files .dsc, .changes and .debian.tar.gz will be uploaded.
Here's my confusion. How'd I make these files have the aforementioned version? i.e. with the "ppa" suffix? Surely, I feel, manually renaming Artha's source package extracted directory doesn't seem the right way.
Also should I debuild -S -sd
or debuild -S -sa
? The Launchpad page says alternative version of an existing package should use the former. This sounds ambiguous for me. What does this mean? Does an updated version count as an alternative version?
There're many detailed pages on setting up a PPA. But they're for setting up only once, while PPAs are all about giving updates to a particular package faster and maintainability is very important, I'd be great if someone could point me to such a document which talks about making updates, etc. i.e. about things that happen to a PPA after the initial upload.