Build Debian packages and offer them in PPAs
Wrapped with a Bow on Top
© Lead Image © belchonock, 123RF.com
Is the current package for your favorite Ubuntu program woefully behind the times? No problem: Just a few steps creates an updated Debian package that you can then share with others in a PPA.
Although your favorite Debian distro comes with many thousands of packages, some updated tools are still occasionally missing. Eventually, the maintainers might offer the corresponding packages themselves, but packaging these tools in a timely manner for each release of a distribution can be difficult.
If you want to use a new version of a program that is not yet included in your current distribution, you can create a solution yourself without any expertise in building Debian packages. If the package sources for the old version are available, constructing packages from them for the new version is usually pretty easy to do. A positive side effect is that you have the opportunity to do something good for the open source community: Provide your packages to Launchpad [1] via a PPA (Personal Package Archive) and share the results of your work with other users.
In this article, I describe an example of how to build a new, updated Debian package from old sources for the KDE backup software Kup. Most of your work will be in the terminal, because you'll be working in a chroot environment, which only makes sense from the command line. Basic knowledge of the command line's general functionality is therefore required, and you should be familiar with the important commands. The first step involves creating a suitable environment for constructing the package.
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