PPA (Personal Package Archive)

Paperman can be published to a Launchpad PPA so that users can install it directly with apt.

One-time Setup

These steps only need to be done once per Launchpad account.

  1. Register your GPG key with the Ubuntu keyserver:

    gpg --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --send-keys <YOUR_KEY_FINGERPRINT>

  2. Import the key on Launchpad. Go to https://launchpad.net/~/+editpgpkeys, paste your key fingerprint, click “Import Key” and follow the email-verification steps.

  3. Create the PPA. Go to https://launchpad.net/~<USER>/+activate-ppa and fill in a name (e.g. ppa), display name and description. Click “Activate”.

  4. Configure dput. Create or update ~/.dput.cf:

    [ppa]
fqdn = ppa.launchpad.net
method = ftp
incoming = ~<USER>/ubuntu/ppa/
login = anonymous
allow_unsigned_uploads = 0

  5. Set the GPG key in scripts/ppa-upload. Edit the GPG_KEY variable near the top of the script to match your key fingerprint.

Uploading

Run from the project source directory (where debian/changelog.in lives):

# Dry run — build source packages without uploading
scripts/ppa-upload --dry-run

# Upload for a single distro
scripts/ppa-upload noble

# Upload for all configured distros
scripts/ppa-upload

The script:

  • auto-detects the project name and version from debian/changelog.in and debian/control.in

  • creates a clean source tarball using git archive

  • builds source packages for each target distro in parallel

  • signs each package sequentially (GPG agent cannot handle parallel signing)

  • uploads to the PPA with dput

Use --dry-run to test the build without uploading. Individual distro names can be passed as arguments to upload a subset.

Checking Build Status

After uploading, check the build status on Launchpad at https://launchpad.net/~<USER>/+archive/ubuntu/ppa.

Users install with:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:<USER>/ppa
sudo apt update
sudo apt install paperman

Target Distributions

The default target distributions are configured in scripts/ppa-upload (the ALL_DISTROS variable). Distro-specific debian/control and debian/rules files are selected automatically if present (e.g. debian/control.bionic), otherwise the .in templates are used.