Ubuntu – How to get notfications of ppa updates

launchpadnotificationppa

How can I get notified of updates to a certain PPA?

For example when I am interested in new package versions of a certain package in a certain PPA?

If a user has the package in question installed and is using the default desktop, she probably get notified via an icon in the traybar or something like that.

But I am searching for a method which works even when the package is not installed (and without gnome).

It should be reliable and prompt.

Does launchpad provides some RSS/Atom-Feed features for PPAs? Or email notifications?

(As a sidenote: I am surprised that even with my own PPA I only get an upload notification via mail – but no notification when the binary package is finished.)

Best Answer

Sadly, Launchpad doesn't offer RSS feeds for PPAs. There's been an open bug on this for a while.

UbuntuUpdates.org is a third party service that offers feeds for some selected PPAs.

Related Solutions

Package Versioning for PPA Upload – How to Guide

The version of the resulting package comes from the version number provided in debian/changelog So you must have the appropriate version there.

1.0.3-1 will supersede an Ubuntu only upload versionized 1.0.3-0ubuntu1

$ dpkg --compare-versions 1.0.3-1 le 1.0.3-0ubuntu1 || echo "False"
False

But it will not supersede a version originating from Debian with Ubuntu changes, i.e. 1.0.3-1ubuntu1

$ dpkg --compare-versions 1.0.3-1 le 1.0.3-1ubuntu1 || echo "False"
$

The tilda (~) character has a special meaning in version numbers. For example:

$ dpkg --compare-versions 1.0.3-1 le 1.0.3-1~ppa1 || echo "False"
False

As your package is not originating from Debian, I go with a version number like 1.0.3-0~ppa1 This guarantees that it is less than either a version synced directly from Debian or introduced in Ubuntu,

So your change log should look like:

artha (1.0.3-0~ppa1) quantal; urgency=low

  * New upstream release.

 -- Your Name <foo@bar.com>  Sun, 07 Oct 2012 13:06:56 -0400

Whether to use debuild -S -sd or debuild -S -sa is really a different question, but here's a brief answer.

-sa ensures that the .orig.tar.bz2 will be uploaded. If you haven't made an upload of this upstream version before, use this.

-sd explicitly makes it so that only the debian.tar.gz or diff.tar.gz are uploaded. This is for when you are making a change to an upstream version that is already available in you target archive or PPA. This is because th original tarball should already be present there.

Ubuntu – How to copy a package from Debian to the PPA

You do need to rebuild the source package locally before uploading in order to adjust the change log and regenerate the changes file. Though since backporting a package is a pretty common task, this has been scripted. Check out the backportpackage command ubuntu-dev-tools Install ubuntu-dev-tools package.

To backport a package from Debian, simply provide the target distro series, PPA, and the dsc file for the package:

backportpackage -d trusty -u ppa:gourmet/ppa http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/pool/main/g/gourmet/gourmet_0.17.3-1.dsc

It's even simpler to backport a package from one Ubuntu release to another since you don't need to find the dsc file. Let's say we want to backport from utopic to trusty:

backportpackage -s utopic -d trusty -u ppa:gourmet/ppa gourmet

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Package Versioning for PPA Upload – How to Guide

Ubuntu – How to copy a package from Debian to the PPA

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