MOTU Journey: Updating logjam

In order to get more confident with packaging tools I decided to try to upgrade a package. After a breaf search, I started working on LP #682461, upgrade logjam to new upstream version. I needed some theorical background for this, so I started reading the Updating a Package Recipe and the log from Didier Roche - How To Update a Package, IRC session.

The biggest obstacle to tackle were the patches. There were three patches in debian/patches and non of them applied cleanly, two of them where already in upstream source code so they are not needed anymore, but how do I delete them? Asking on #ubuntu-motu got me to Using Quilt, in debian wiki (thanks to c2tarun and RAOF for the words of wisdom). That leaved me with one patch that needed to be refreshed (almost all parts of the patch were merged upstream), which was not so difficult following the step in Using Quilt's wiki.

It was time to build the package on pbuilder and it failed to build due to missing Build-Depends. I wasn't if it was a good practice to add Build-Depends when updating a package so asked on #ubuntu-motu and it's ok as long as their actually needed. So I added the missing Build-Depends and pbuilder built the package \o/ Now it was time to attach the .dsc, .debian.tar.gz and .orig.tar.bz2 files and suscribe Ubuntu Sponsors Team to the Launchpad bug and we are done.

Picture by: Steve Jurvetson.