launchpadppa
So that I just have to maintain one PPA on maybe Launchpad and have all the packages I like.
Update: Nifty workarounds are welcome, too 😉
Update: I'm running a server here at home. So if there is a solution where I can set up my own private repo, that would be totally fine.
This can easily be done on Launchpad. What you are looking for is called a source package recipe.
The way to set this up and get it building the source every day is to first register the project on Launchpad if it isn't already. Once that is complete, go to the project page and click "configure project branch":
Now you need to tell Launchpad where the SVN repository is. Click "Import a branch hosted somewhere else", select 'SVN', and enter the URL of the SVN branch. Give the branch a name and click update:
Now you have the contents of the SVN repository being imported into Launchpad every so often (usually more than once per day). The next step is to create a source package recipe that builds the package from source every day. There are basically two options here:
debian.Since the first option is the easiest, I'd recommend going that route. To set up the daily builds, head to your project's page on Launchpad and click the "code" link at the very top. Click on the branch that contains the source code and then click "create packaging recipe":
From there, simply accept all of the defaults and click "create recipe". That's it! Your packages will be built each day (assuming there are new revisions) and placed in the PPA you specified when you created the recipe.
References:
Look in my bookjar project: http://code.google.com/p/bookjar/source/browse/
specifically the debian directory (especially the debian/package.sh file) and the build.xml (ant) file. In that file there is a new target 'upload' that uploads a buildable artefact to the launchpad buildbot.
I'm using ivy and the netbeans ant infrastructure so it's likely to be slightly different for you. However, one thing is certain: you can't use ivy or maven from the remote buildserver. You need to upload all libraries you use, either in the form of code or jars. ivy:retrive downloads the files to the current_dir/lib so my project in netbeans is setup to look for it's libraries there (nblibraries.properties is part of the netbeans infrastructure for that). Read the build.xml for details (basically the debian/rules files call a special ant target to build in the server that doesn't try to symlink the jar files - because they are already copied there).
I'm also taking advantage in my package.sh of my project being in mercurial to build a changelog file from the hg log, so there are other problems to solve if you want the same degree of automatism and don't use hg (in fact, i think that my changelog is bending the rules of debian changelogs by having each change be a 'minor' release).
Best Answer
You could set up an apt proxy daemon on the server, something like apt-cacher-ng or apt-mirror for example (sorry, no more info, haven't tested it, but google seems to have a wealth of information about these packages).