Martin Pool's blog

Avoiding "not permitted to upload" errors from PPAs

Morten asked today on irc about an error I have hit before myself: you go to upload your new package to a PPA, and get an odd message of Not permitted to upload to the RELEASE pocket in a series in the 'CURRENT' state.

What this means is that your upload was trying to go into the Ubuntu distribution, rather than into a PPA, and you're not authorized to put it there. The underlying reason is that the command line for dput, the tool for uploading source packages, is

dput [options] [host] package.changes ...

It's easy to forget the optional host parameter and if it's omitted it uploads into the Ubuntu archive.

There is a pretty easy (if crude) way to disable this behaviour, by adding these lines to your ~/.dput.cf:

[DEFAULT]
default_host_main = notspecified

[notspecified]
fqdn = SPECIFY.A.PPA.NAME

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