I have a bunch of packages in my PPA and a reasonable knowledge on how to build Debian/Ubuntu packages, so far so good. My issue is that I don't really have an idea how to properly maintain them for different versions of Ubuntu and how to handle Ubuntu upgrades. Right now I am doing all of these things manually, which for most part simply means updating the version number in debian/changelog and reuploading them, which sounds easy enough, however when having to do that for a dozen packages, across numerous versions of Ubuntu, things can get a little tiresome and error prone.
When there are small changes needed to be done to the debian/control files, debian/rules or the source things get of course even more complicated. While I can maintain those changes in git-buildpackage fine, getting constant merge conflicts in the debian/control file, due to backports having different version number then the current package, kind of throws me of the rails and makes things even more complicated.
So essentially: What are some best practices for building and maintaining Ubuntu packages, so that it's easy to make them available across multiple version of Ubuntu?
Good question , as am learning packages myself and want to maintain a package for a good software project .. have you looked at the following page :
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PackagingGuide/Complete