There is a lot of documentation on the use of Debian/Ubuntu packaging tools, but most of these pages just list
the options of each of these tools. After fighting with these for some period, I jumped over to the
#ubuntu-packaging IRC channel for help. After explaining my intent of backporting some packages unchanged,
I was pointed to the backportpackage
tool:
backportpackage fetches a package from one distribution release or from a
specified .dsc path or URL and creates a no-change backport of that package
to one or more Ubuntu releases release, optionally doing a test build of
the package and/or uploading the resulting backport for testing.
This tool comes with the
ubuntu-dev-tools
package.
I needed to backport the ocaml source package from precise (12.04) to all earlier releases up to lucid (10.04). For the backport to oneiric, here is the command:
amplidata-2.5 is the identifier to the PPA as defined in my
dput.cnf file. I also configured the file
~/.devscripts with the keys
DEBEMAIL, DEBFULLNAME and DEBSIGN_KEYID.