How to sponsor a sync

Use these instructions when sponsoring an upload.

Sponsorship series

The article series provides guidance on requesting sponsorship and sponsoring.

Overview:
For contributors:
For sponsors:

If you have the permissions to upload the package to Ubuntu, you can issue a sync request using the syncpackage(1) tool (from the ubuntu-dev-tools package).

The tool asks Launchpad to copy the source-package publication entry from its import of Debian. You can do this for any package you could upload directly to Ubuntu.

To be able to use syncpackage, the package needs to be known to Launchpad. The process relies on several steps that need to be completed for the Debian source upload:

  1. Having been processed by the Debian archive.

  2. Pushed to mirrors.

  3. Imported by Launchpad.

Therefore, there may be a delay before recent recent uploads are available, i.e. before you can use the syncpackage tool (in general, not more than a day). The Debian publication history in Launchpad shows when uploads have been imported:

https://launchpad.net/debian/+source/<source_package_name>/+publishinghistory

For example: Publishing history of hello package in Debian.

Note

Although you don’t need to file a sync-request bug if you have direct upload permissions (unless you need Freeze exceptions), still check How to request a sync and make sure there’s a good reason for dropping any Ubuntu changes as a result of the sync.

Use the syncpackage tool

The general syntax of a sync request is:

$ syncpackage --release=<target-Ubuntu-release> \
              --distribution=<source-Debian-distribution> \
              --verbose --force \
              <package_name>

For example:

$ syncpackage -r questing-proposed -d unstable -v -f hello

Further reading