Ubuntu – How to easily bump a package for a PPA

launchpadpackagingppa

What's the easiest way to bump the version number for a package that shall be uploaded to a Launchpad PPA?

For instance, what I do now is that on each new release I unpack the previous *.debian.tar.gz, then open debian/changelog, copy/paste top-most entry: 

package (1.67-1~precise~ppa1) precise; urgency=low

  * New upstream release.

 -- Name Surname <email@smth.asd>  Wed, 19 Mar 2014 22:22:03 +0200

Then modify 1.67 to 1.68, and manually change date to Tue, 03 Mar 2015, and save file.

There surely must be a simpler way to do this…

Best Answer

After unpacking the *.debian.tar.gz file, you can use the dch commands to create new changelog entries. For example, dch -i would (probably) bump up the version to 1.67-1~precise~ppa2. You can instead use dch -v "1.68-1~precise~ppa1" to specify the new version.

Note that dch can also take in another argument that represents the message for that changelog entry. For example, dch -v "1.68-1~precise~ppa1" "New upstream release.". You can append to an existing changelog entry by doing dch -a "Another message.".

Note that all of the above commands leave the distribution as UNRELEASED, signifying that it's not ready to be released. You can have dch mark it as released by running dch -r --distribution precise "" (empty message at the end).

To set your name/email combination, you can define the appropriate environment variables in ~/.bashrc: 

export DEBEMAIL="address@someemail.dom"
export DEBFULLNAME="Name Surname"

See also:

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