PPAs and Daily Builds

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So earlier today I was throwing together a script to publish bzr snapshots to a PPA. My use case was pretty simple. It’s a debian native package. So the packaging and upstream are one and the same, so no need to merge branches or make sure patches apply cleanly. Basically just pull, build, and publish with a little bit of magic to set the versions correctly.

But as I know there are a number of PPAs publishing snapshots of upstream sources, I wanted to take a look around and see what others are using. Unfortunetely, there doesn’t really seem to be a location pointing to a list of projects or with general information on how to go about doing this. So here are some of the things I came across, just to put it one place. Maybe it’s time for a wiki page?

First of all, James Westby is up to something really exciting with bzr-builder (a plugin for bzr written in python) and Daily Debs. The basic idea is to make doing nightly builds of upstream projects almost trivial by using simple recipe files while bzr-builder does all the heavy lifting. A recipie file could look as simple as this:

branch lp:foo
merge lp:foo/debian-pkg

I can’t wait to see where this is going and to hear more about the discussions around it at UDS.

You can find the spec here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DailyUpstreamBuildsPOCSpec

The code for bzr-builder is here: https://code.edge.launchpad.net/~james-w/bzr-builder/trunk

And a PPA of bzr-builder made with bzr-builder is here: https://edge.launchpad.net/~dailydebs-team/+archive/bzr-builder

Some of the most used daily build PPAs are probably the Mozilla Daily Builds and  Chromium Daily Builds. Along with the gwibber-daily PPA, these are run by Fabien Tassin. The bash scripts he uses to produce them can be found here: https://code.edge.launchpad.net/~fta/+junk/ppa-scripts

Project Neon has a PPAdelivering nighly builds of Amarok and other KDE goodies. The build scripts are written in Ruby and hosted on KDE’s svn: http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/extragear/multimedia/amarok/supplementary_scripts/neon/

Anyone else doing something cool? Know where to find some more examples?

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