How to Sync Packages from Debian to your PPA

If you’re a PPA maintainer, what do you do when you have the cool app (or a newer version of that cool app) you want to use has already been packaged in Debian but isn’t available in the Ubuntu repositories yet? I couldn’t find documentation on how to sync to a PPA so I thought I’d share what I figured out today.

1. First, install ubuntu-dev-tools.
2. Then run syncpackage --no-lp nameofpackage
3. Then upload to your PPA: dput ppa:username/ppaname *source.changes

The --no-lp option is very important; if you don’t use that, syncpackage will attempt to upload to the main Ubuntu repositories.

If you’re running Ubuntu 11.10, step 2 will sync from Debian unstable for upload to Oneiric. If this isn’t what you need then use -d to specify the Debian download series and -r to specify the Ubuntu upload series.

Here’s a real-world example:
$ syncpackage --no-lp tracker -d experimental
syncpackage: Downloading tracker_0.12.4.orig.tar.bz2 from ftp.debian.org (7.640 MiB)
syncpackage: Downloading tracker_0.12.4-1.debian.tar.gz from ftp.debian.org (0.018 MiB)
dpkg-source: info: extracting tracker in tracker-0.12.4
dpkg-source: info: unpacking tracker_0.12.4.orig.tar.bz2
dpkg-source: info: unpacking tracker_0.12.4-1.debian.tar.gz
signfile tracker_0.12.4-1.dsc Jeremy Bicha <EMAIL>
signfile tracker_0.12.4-1_source.changes Jeremy Bicha <EMAIL>
Successfully signed dsc and changes files
$ dput ppa:gnome3-team/gnome3 tracker_0.12.4-1_source.changes
Checking signature on .changes
gpg: Signature made Sun 09 Oct 2011 11:28:07 AM EDT using RSA key ID EBFE6C7D
gpg: Good signature from "Jeremy Bicha <EMAIL>"
Good signature on /home/jeremy/devel/nemiver/temp4/tracker_0.12.4-1_source.changes.
Checking signature on .dsc
gpg: Signature made Sun 09 Oct 2011 11:28:06 AM EDT using RSA key ID EBFE6C7D
gpg: Good signature from "Jeremy Bicha <EMAIL>"
Good signature on /home/jeremy/devel/nemiver/temp4/tracker_0.12.4-1.dsc.
Uploading to ppa (via sftp to ppa.launchpad.net):
tracker_0.12.4-1.dsc: done.
tracker_0.12.4.orig.tar.bz2: done.
tracker_0.12.4-1.debian.tar.gz: done.
tracker_0.12.4-1_source.changes: done.
Successfully uploaded packages.

EDIT: micahg has suggested backportpackage which can do all this and more. One command can pull from any official Debian or Ubuntu repository, build locally, and upload to your PPA.