How do I copy a package from Debian to my PPA?
- by Bernhard Reiter
I'd like to add the latest gourmet package from Debian sid to our team's PPA so Ubuntu users who would like to run an up-to-date version of Gourmet can add that PPA to their software sources. (Dependency-wise, that shouldn't be much of an issue as pretty much all our current dependencies are already available in all currently supported Ubuntu versions.)
I've downloaded the *.dsc file and debian and orig tarballs, and even figured out I could use this for the package's source.changes file. I also downloaded the Debian maintainer's public key so dput can validate the package. I then tried to upload the package to our PPA using dput ppa:~gourmet/ppa gourmet_0.17.3-1_source.changes (I also tried without the tilda.)
This seemed to succeed, but I didn't get a confirmation email, and no packages are now displayed at our PPA, which leads me to believe that the package was rejected because the Debian maintainer's key is obviously not among our team members' keys.
So what's the easiest way to "copy" a package from Debian (sid) to a Launchpad PPA? Do I really need to rebuild the entire package locally before I can upload it?