bzr-builddeb has been ACCEPTed to ubuntu. It was developed by James Westby, with the help of Martin F. Krafft and others. Additional information about the project can be found on the debian wiki: http://wiki.debian.org/BzrBuildpackage

bzr-builddeb promises to facilitate managing debian packages with bzr. It is implemented as bzr plugin, which you can either install via apt-get, or in your ~/.bazaar/plugins directory. You can see the available branches here: https://code.launchpad.net/bzr-builddeb/. Feel free to contribute by pushing your branches to launchpad as well and tell us where we can merge from you.

Okay, given that you have installed bzr-builddeb, how to use it? In principle, you use it with bzr bd in the package branch. It will by default create a directory ../build-area, where the package gets exported to and actually built. If it is a non-native package, you can place the orig.tar.gz in that directory as well. Alternatively, you can create a file called .bzr-builddeb/local.conf in the package branch, where you can configure e.g. where bzr-builddeb looks for the orig tarball.

You can configure many more things than just the location of the orig tarball. You can also use bzr-builddeb in *merge mode*. In this mode, only the debian/ directory is versioned. This can be useful if you e.g. have the upstream branch imported by launchpad, and want to keep packaging separate. For a full list of options, look in /usr/share/doc/bzr-builddeb/README.gz

One last thing: In ubuntu, we need to upload *source* packages. Unfortunately, bzr-builddeb does not easily allow to pass the options -S / -sa to the builder. You can work around this by specifying the builder manually like this:

bzr bd --builder='debuild -S -sa'

This is a bit unfortunate, but not easily to solve, since the bzr option parser does not support options like -sa. If you can think of a solution, feel free to point us to your branch.

Anyway, have fun with managing your packages in bzr!

~~DISCUSSION~~

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