I'm starting to manage more custom-packaged applications for our Ubuntu Hardy systems. Some are of apps not available in Ubuntu but most are much newer versions than are available via the standard "-backports" process.
I'm trying to settle on the best way to manage these packages in subversion. One thought is just to commit the dpkg-buildpackage generated diff. Has anyone found a better way?
If you want to use subversion, use svn-buildpackage. There are also bzr-buildpackage, git-buildpackage, and so on. These all work similarly; you store either the full original source plus debian/ in version control, or only debian/ (which in turn might contain your patches).
If you are dealing with Ubuntu packages, it would make some sense to use bzr, because then you can easily branch and merge with the original Ubuntu bzr repositories.
You could use bzr-buildpackage. It has a nice guide at http://jameswestby.net/bzr/builddeb/user_manual/
