Backport dar

Versioning

Backporting dar is quite simple - you just need to recompile the Etch version in a Sarge environment. It's a nice occasion to cover the very basics.

You need to modify debian/changelog though. Enter the dar-2.3.0 directory, and type:

dch -i

If you want to use another editor, you can also:

EDITOR=emacs dch -i

Here's my final changelog entry:

dar (2.3.0-5~bpo.1) sarge-backports; urgency=low

  * Rebuild for Debian Backports <http://www.backports.org/>
    (new version adds support for extended attributes)

 -- Sylvain Beucler <beuc@beuc.net>  Thu, 14 Sep 2006 16:37:59 +0200

What did I do?

• Changed version according to bpo convention, -debian_version~bpo.1, so:
  • the testing version was: 0.4-7
  • dch proposes by default -debian_version+1: 0.4-8
  • I use -debian_version~bpo.1: 0.4-7~bpo.1
• Changed distribution from unstable to sarge-backports
• Added a terse explanation
• Replaced root <root@sylvain> with a real e-mail address.

Then, in the dar-2.3.0 directory, start the compilation.

debuild -us -uc

Using the -sa debuild option: not necessary: by default, if the version ends with '0' or '1' (as 'bpo1' does), dpkg-buildpackage uses the existing source release (the .orig.tar.gz file must be present in the parent directory, though).

Installation

Now you can test your dar package:

sudo dpkg -i dar_2.3.0-5~bpo.1_i386.deb libdar64-4_2.3.0-5~bpo.1_i386.deb

Check your changes

Check your changes using interdiff:

mkdir tmp
cd tmp
cp ../dar*.diff.gz .
gunzip *
interdiff dar_2.3.0-5.diff dar_2.3.0-5~bpo.1.diff

If you see some source changes that you didn't do, then your backport is not clean (probably it's a leftover from an incomplete make clean). Usually, just remove the current directory and extract a new clean one using dpkg-source.