[ec2-beta] RFC: screenbin -- like pastebin, but for screen, using Ubuntu in Amazon EC2

[Dustin Kirkland]

On Tue, Jan 13, 2009 at 1:35 PM, Mark Shuttleworth
<mark.shuttleworth at canonical.com> wrote:
> We really need a good way to make packages for multiple releases :-/

CC-ing ubuntu-devel@, as I think this discussion would benefit from
their input...

I agree...

I've struggled with this now for several small packages that I've
created from scratch which (fortunately) do not depend on the Ubuntu
release (screenbin, screen-profiles, update-motd, musica).  I build
source packages separately for each release, bump each version, and
push separately to my PPA.

It would be nice to use wildcards, comparators, or lists in the
release field in the changelog and have Launchpad/PPAs/Soyuz sort out
the build complexy, pushing the .deb file to the correct locations and
lists.

For example, changelog entries that might look like:
 foo (1.0-0ubuntu1) *; urgency=low
 bar (1.0-0ubuntu1) dapper,hardy,intrepid; urgency=low
 baz (1.8) >dapper; urgency=low
 blah (1.3) <=jaunty; urgency=low

Or, if not handled on the build side, perhaps on the developer end, by
a changelog preprocessor built into the devscripts, that would parse
this entry and perhaps construct a list of releases to build, and
iterate over that list?

Is this a violation of Debian policy?  I imagine that I have
oversimplified the technical details ;-)  But there are enough smart
people on these lists that I'm sure we can zero in on a viable
solution.

-- 
:-Dustin