Ppa Dev Tools

ppa is a command line client for managing PPAs in Launchpad.

This primarily focuses on functionality needed by owners of PPAs, to assist in their creation, deletion, and configuration. A key functionality is to poll and wait until the package(s) in the PPA have completed building; this permits blocking on the builds to delay other actions such as requesting users on a bug report to test the PPA, or submitting a merge proposal for the update to be considered for inclusion in the distro.

You can view a team's registered PPAs using 'ppa list'.

Usage

Register a new PPA

$ ppa create my-ppa
PPA 'my-ppa' created for the following architectures:

   i386, amd64, armel, armhf, ppc64el, s390x, arm64, powerpc

The PPA can be viewed at:

   https://launchpad.net/~my-name/+archive/ubuntu/my-ppa

You can upload packages to this PPA using:

   dput ppa:my-name/my-ppa <source.changes>

Upload a package to the PPA

$ dput ppa:my-name/my-ppa some-package.changes

Wait until all packages in the PPA have finished building

$ ppa wait ppa:my-name/my-ppa

Set the public description for a PPA from a file

$ cat some-package/README | ppa desc ppa:my-name/my-ppa

Trigger autopkgtests for the package, and check results

$ ppa tests ppa:my-name/my-ppa

Delete the PPA

$ ppa destroy ppa:my-name/my-ppa

Auto-linked Autopkgtest Trigger URLS

By default, ppa tests will display autopkgtest triggers as hyperlinked text. The hyperlinking feature is supported on many newer terminal programs but as it's a relatively recent VTE function it may not yet be available in the terminal you use. The following terminal programs are believed to support it:

• iTerm2 3.1
• DomTerm 1.0.2
• hTerm 1.76
• Terminology 1.3?
• Gnome Terminal 3.26 (VTE 0.50)
• Guake 3.2.1 (VTE 0.50)
• TOXTerm 3.5.1 (VTE 0.50)
• Tilix 3.26 (VTE 0.50)
• Terminator 2.0

This is not a comprehensive list, and likely will lengthen swiftly. Meanwhile, if you have a non-supporting browser, the --show-urls option can be passed to ppa tests to make it display the raw URLs that can be manually cut and pasted into your web browser.

Autopkgtesting Reverse-dependencies

In addition to creating trigger URLs for running your package's autopkgtest, it is also possible to do the same for everything dependent on your package. These other packages are termed 'reverse dependencies', aka 'rdepends'. To generate these URLs, just include the '--show-rdepends' option in your command line. For example:

$ ppa tests --show-rdepends ppa:my-name/my-ppa

The ppa command calculates the dependency trees using information from the Apt archive, which needs to be cached locally. Only the index information is needed, not a complete mirror. You can generate (and refresh) a dists-only mirror thusly:

$ mkdir {LOCAL_REPOSITORY_PATH} $ rsync -va \ --exclude={{'/installer','/i18n/','/uefi/','/Contents','/by-hash/','*tar.gz'}} \ rsync://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists {LOCAL_REPOSITORY_PATH}

It's recommended to run the rsync command as a cronjob to keep your repository up to date as often as desired.