A script for supporting multiple Ubuntu releases in a PPA

Something I find time consuming is uploading to a PPA when you want to support multiple Ubuntu releases. For my projects I generally want to support the most recent LTS release, the current stable release and the current development release (precise, quantal and raring when this was written).

I have my program in a branch and release that with make distcheck and lp-project-upload. The packaging is stored in another branch.

For each release I update the packaging with dch -i and add a new entry, e.g.

myproject (0.1.5-0ubuntu1) precise; urgency=low

  * New upstream release:
    - New exciting stuff

 -- Me <me@canonical.com>  Thu, 27 Dec 2012 16:52:22 +1300

I then run release.sh and this generates three source packages and uploads them to the PPA:

NAME=myproject
PPA=ppa:myteam/myproject
RELEASES="raring quantal precise"

VERSION=`head -1 debian/changelog | grep -o '[0-9.]*' | head -1`
ORIG_RELEASE=`head -1 debian/changelog | sed 's/.*) \(.*\);.*/\1/'`
for RELEASE in $RELEASES ;
do
  cp debian/changelog debian/changelog.backup
  sed -i "s/${ORIG_RELEASE}/${RELEASE}/;s/0ubuntu1/0ubuntu1~${RELEASE}1/" debian/changelog
  bzr-buildpackage -S -- -sa
  dput ${PPA} ../${NAME}_${VERSION}-0ubuntu1~${RELEASE}1_source.changes
  mv debian/changelog.backup debian/changelog
done

Hope this is useful for someone!

Note I don't use source recipes as I want just a single package uploaded for each release.