Uploading to multiple distros

[Robert Collins]

On Fri, Jun 3, 2011 at 2:40 AM, Martin Owens <doctormo at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 2011-06-02 at 13:20 +0100, Ian Jackson wrote:
>> For this to work I think the "suite" target in the changelog entry
>> should be qualified by the distro, so you could say (picking a random
>> example):
>>
>>   picocom (1.4-1) debian:unstable ubuntu:oneiric; urgency=low
>>
>>     * new upstream version:
>
> Why not just make ppa uploading simpler at the same time? (if you can
> change the changelog file processing):
>
> picocom (1.4-1) debian:unstable oneiric natty maverick lucid;
> urgency=low
>
> Instead of pushing 6 different packages, we could push just the one.
> Have the tools search for a match and build for that archive.

The challenge with ppas here  is that a package can only be built once
in a given archive: the binary package names are the same for all of
unstable/oneiric/natty/maverick/lucid : the APT archive which makes up
a PPA cannot present different binary versions for each series.

We could build only in lucid and then promote the package forward (the
same as doing a 'binary + source copy' between
lucid->maverick->natty->oneiric. For many packages though, that will
run into various dependency / toolchain hell issues - particularly
because source packages tend to be updated to build with the latest
dpkg/debhelper etc, rather than staying geared to build with lucids
dpkg.
-Rob