Posted on by Daniel Holbach

The five minute introduction to Ubuntu development

We need some feedback. Can you please leave a comment with the information

  • you wish you had had heard when you got involved with Ubuntu development
  • you want to share with new starters in Ubuntu development
  • you learnt and found invaluable

As you can imagine, your feedback is going to make the experience for new contributors even better. Thanks a lot in advance.

  • John Doe

    Clear and concise instructions for packaging the software.

  • I wish I had heard:That there is a community constatly willing to help on IRC, #ubuntu-devel, #ubuntu-motu, #ubuntu-packaging. (This I learned saturday when speaking with you). I thought Mailing List were more appropriate since it gives space to elaborate on issues and they offer a great archive of things already discussed, but never under estimate the people helping out on IRC. but this requires you to know enough to understand the answers providedI want to share with people starting out:Probably creating metapackages, it is a fun way to get started with creating packages out of putting certain apps together, Jorge Castro wrote quite a few years ago about B-Sides. http://www.jorgecastro.org/2009/11/28/attack-of-the-killer-bs/ I manage o make a fork for the applications I usually install for personal use. I changed the metapackage and published it into my ppa. this gives me a sandbox to experiment a bit with the basic tools.I learnt and found invaluable:Learning to package from scratch is great, but do not rush into it. wait for it to happen naturally, get confortable with tools first and remember that  the community is helpful and that one should give back as well, try to colaborate answering questions about packaging on IRC and other channels.

    • Dražen Lučanin

      True. Some channels are definitely more active than the others and should be promoted even more to get potentially interested people into direct communication even sooner.

  • Dražen Lučanin

    For me, one of the things that might get better coverage is [Using development releases](https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UsingDevelopmentReleases). Usually only pbuilder is explained in the introductory tutorials, but without running a +1 release using chroot, TestDrive or something a developer won’t really know if some bug is still present in the newer version, whether his desired feature makes sense or has the API changed, he won’t be able to test his package at runtime next to all the other newest versions…

    To get to this information, one has to go dig through the wiki and find it somewhere in the “packaging” section.

    BTW, this document is something that’s only being planned or is there a first version already available somewhere?

  • hydron

    (*)Ubuntu is great as an idea and as a philosophy, but needs more work to get perfect.

  • Francisco P.L.

    about the bug fixing iniciative + harvest , sometimes new contributors just need a bug to work on