Creating a PPA for OpenERP

Question

I'm investigating whether it's worth the effort of setting up a recipe in Launchpad to create a PPA for OpenERP that includes the official source code along with our custom modules. Has anyone done this for OpenERP or another software package? Was it worth the effort? Is there an easy guide to the process?

We're currently using a script that uses bzr to check for new revisions in the repository, checks them out, and then copies them into the installation folder for the live server. It sounds like a PPA would make the upgrade process feel much more like a standard Ubuntu upgrade.

I found the Launchpad documentation and the Ubuntu packaging guide, so I'm working my way through those. It also looks like the credativ team has created a PPA of OpenERP. Can I just copy those and point them at my own branches?

Answer 1

I've almost got it working, so here's a summary of what I've done so far.

It's well worth reading through the Ubuntu packaging guide and following the "Hello, World" example, just so you know what the packaging files do.

Specific to OpenERP, I stumbled across the OpenERP Tools project, and used the packaging61 script to create the Debian package. I published a modified version that targets a Launchpad PPA.

I now have a package in my PPA that installs and runs, but there's something wrong with the web server. It supports the GTK client, though.