updating Debian PEAR packages

Fri, Nov 1, 2013

After preparing my first Debian packages this summer (some dependencies for Composer, which in turn is a dependency for wp-cli, which is the software i’m really after), i have been postponing updating them with new (minor so far) upstream releases mainly as i kinda dreaded having to work with PEAR’s tools to figure out how to best import new upstream releases.

It turns out it’s extremely simple and quick – and i’m writing it up here mainly as a reminder to myself. I am updating these packages now to sync them with current upstream releases, but also to remove the Build-Depends on the pear-symfony2-channel which never made it to the official Debian repositories and is being superseded by pear-channels like all other legacy Debian packages for individual PEAR channels.

What i am doing, basically, is:

git checkout upstream-sid
pear download <Package>

(Package-x.y.N.tgz is downloaded)

git mv <Package-x.y.M> <Package-x.y.N>
tar xvzf Package-x.y.N

(this overwrites files as needed; now we check what the new code is like, if there is anything needing attention regarding license, etc.)

git diff
git add <new files if ok and changed files if ok>

git commit -m 'Import of x.y.N'
git tag -u <signing_key> -s upstream/x.y.N

If using a pristine-tar branch (as for php-symfony-console), the process is slightly different (and possibly, this should be the way to do things in any case, but i have only figured this out after having tagged all the new releases, so i will check this on the next update): once the Package-x.y.N.tgz file is downloaded, we can import its delta against the previous version via git-import-orig:

mv Package-x.y.N.tgz ..
git-import-orig -u x.y.N ../Package-x.y.N.tgz

(again, i need to check this on next update, but i believe that all it takes is actually a single git-import-orig --uscan, which should take care of pretty much everything up to now).

Now the Debian fun starts:

git checkout debian-sid
git merge upstream-sid

(the upstream code is merged)

gbp dch

(a new changelog entry is generated; this needs to be checked and updated as needed; any updated copyright information or other changes to Debian packages should be done at this stage and ideally committed individually – otherwise we just commit the updated changelog)

git add debian/changelog

and finally

git-buildpackage

That’s it – if everything is working as expected, assuming nothing has been pushed anywhere yet, we can make a final update to changelog by switching release from UNRELEASED to whatever appropriate and amend the previous commit on the debian-sid branch.

Once everything is finalised, we can tag the Debian release:

git tag debian/x.y.N-Z

and push to git.debian.org.