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Building a PPA for Ubuntu

Ubuntu introduced something called Personal Package Archive, which is essentially just a .deb archive, built using Ubuntu’s build machine. You read that right, if you want to offer your own customized ubuntu packages for some reason (I wanted to build nightly .deb’s), you just have to upload your source packages to your PPA and Ubuntu will build it for you for i386, amd64 and lpia.

The whole process is completely painless. You just have to log into Launchpad, sign their code of conduct and create a new PPA archive. This will allow you to later use dput to upload it to their builders.

With this I’m happy to introduce nightlies of PSPP, free statistical application (a clone of SPSS):

https://launchpad.net/~gandalf/+archive/pspp