At the vUDS in November we talked about having events where local communities could learn more about app development for Ubuntu for the first time. Since then we have come a long way: We have some really nice materials set up. The first events were held in a number of places around the world. We got feedback and improved our docs. Before the Ubuntu Global Jam and the release parties for 14....
I’m pleased to announce the following changes have landed in the Ubuntu Packaging Guide: The Packaging Guide is now fully translated into French! Bravo, équipe français! Thanks a lot everyone who helped out here! We moved from developer.ubuntu.com/packaging to our new home http://packaging.ubuntu.com - don’t despair, redirects are in place!This was done, because developer.ubuntu.com more and more moved into the direction of delivering tutorials for people who want to create content (apps, scopes, charms, etc....
The German translations team have done it! They brought the German translation of the Ubuntu Packaging Guide above 70%, which is the magic threshold for us to enable the translation in the package. Since earlier today you will find this in the Packaging Guide Daily Build PPA (soon going to land in Debian and then in Ubuntu too): daniel@daydream:~$ apt-cache search german packaging guide ubuntu ubuntu-packaging-guide-html-de - Ubuntu Packaging Guide - HTML guide - German version ubuntu-packaging-guide-pdf-de - Ubuntu Packaging Guide - PDF guide - German version ubuntu-packaging-guide-epub-de - Ubuntu Packaging Guide - EPUB guide - German version daniel@daydream:~$ You can also check out the HTML version, single page HTML, PDF version and EPUB version on the web....
I’m particularly happy to announce that the Brazilian team managed to get their translation of the Ubuntu Packaging Guide up to more than 70% of completion, which is the magic threshold to get it accepted and posted on developer.ubuntu.com. This means that our current list of available languages is: English Spanish (99%) Russian (85%) Brazilian Portuguese (74%) You can view the individual forms of the Packaging Guide in Brazilian Portuguese here:...
We have achieved a huge milestone in the development community. For years we wanted translatable packaging and development documentation. It’s there. If you head to http://developer.ubuntu.com/packaging/ you can see the following: The Ubuntu Packaging Guide (Spanish) – would you like to learn how to package or become an Ubuntu Developer? Here’s a comprehensive, topic-base guide that explores and describes the main concepts of packaging. It is available as a single HTML page (Spanish), a PDF document (Spanish), or in EPUB format (for eBook readers) (Spanish)....
One group in Ubuntu which never gets the credit they deserve are the translators. These fine people spend hours smoothing the road for Ubuntu into all the parts of the world. One project where this recently became clear to me again was the Packaging Guide. Weighing in at 759 strings or 196K of text, and at times very technical text, it’s probably not the easiest document to translate. Still we have a very nice success story to share....
I talked many times about getting involved with developing Ubuntu and how it can seem daunting and that there’s much to learn. When I talked to contributors who had reached the critical point where they understood what they can do, who they can talk to and how the processes roughly work, most of them said that three things helped them to get to the point: the documentation, talking to the people, code reviews....
Users of Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal) now can easily install the Ubuntu Packaging Guide: daniel@daydream:~$ sudo apt-get install ubuntu-packaging-guide Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done The following extra packages will be installed: ubuntu-packaging-guide-html The following NEW packages will be installed: ubuntu-packaging-guide ubuntu-packaging-guide-html 0 upgraded, 2 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded. Need to get 0 B/488 kB of archives. After this operation, 1244 kB of additional disk space will be used....
This morning I woke up and found the sponsoring queue at 103 items! I mailed the ubuntu-devel and ubuntu-motu lists and the current count is down to 81. This is great, but I’m sure we can get it down to 0. Jani Monoses also filed these bugs to discuss how we can improve our sponsoring strategy: Bug #1008449: explicit forward-to-debian tags? Bug #1008445: Support for blacklisting packages Bug #1008441: Allow grouping by contributor You might want to join the conversation....
… for planning things, but also for getting things done. In-between sessions I had discussions with many many folks and I’m happy to say there was renewed and much interest in the Packaging Guide. Heroes like Andrew Starr-Bochicchio, Leo Iannacone, Joseph Mills and others have contributed suggestions, code, ideas and text bits to improve the packaging guide, and that’s on top of what was discussed in the session we had....
One class of new contributors has always been successful: self-starters who knew what they wanted to do, where to get involved, with possibly some already existing experience or knowledge. For others it’s been a tougher ride. To remedy some of this, we set up the Developer Advisory Team. We figured that (among other things) reaching out to new contributors who just got their first fix into Ubuntu to thank them, encourage them and ask for their feedback would help us a lot in terms of bringing them into the fold and finding out what current stumbling blocks are....
I just went over the soon-to-be-released report of the Developer Advisory Team, where we sum up feedback from first-time contributors to Ubuntu Development and many noted that they found developer documentation easily and things generally worked out for them, but they struggled finding stuff to work on. The Ubuntu Development team has always been good at creating new TODO lists (merges, Debian RC bugs, build failures, heaps of different bug lists and much much more), but you need to know what you are looking for....
New contributors who don’t have upload rights to Ubuntu yet get their code reviewed and their packages uploaded by Ubuntu developers. This process is called “sponsoring” and our current process has been in place since pretty much forever. It has even gotten easier over time, so new branches or patches show up on our review queue. Two years ago when we were struggling with getting code reviewed, we put in place “patch pilots”, a great concept we borrowed from the Bazaar team....
Many engineering teams in the Ubuntu world have made extensive use of User Testing in the last years. This is an important reality check for everyone defining the experience of users. Do my assumptions still hold true? What do users expect? Are there use-cases we never considered? Which steps confuse our users? The Ubuntu developers, so everyone who builds Ubuntu, integrates pieces to work nicely with each other, maintains packages and produces the distribution we all love, everyone is interested in this kind of feedback....
We had some excellent Google+ Hangouts last week, where everyone who was interested in getting involved in Ubuntu Development could join in and we had a nice chat in a very relaxed atmosphere. This week we are going to do some more. Here’s the times: Thursday, 15 March 2012, 16:00:00 UTC Friday, 16 March 2012, 08:00:00 UTC Friday, 16 March 2012, 14:00:00 UTC If you haven’t dived into Ubuntu Development yet, but you’re interested, please check out our Ubuntu Development guide!...