Building Ubuntu

Packaging

You don't need to learn about packaging to develop applications, as we’re providing tools to ease the work required to package and distribute apps. Eventually, we want to offer a totally automated experience, so that you can concentrate fully on writing beautiful and successful apps. However, if you are interested in Ubuntu packaging, based on the powerful Debian packaging format and infrastructure, we've prepared some resources to introduce you to this technology.

The Ubuntu Packaging Guide (Spanish, Russian, Brazilian Portuguese, German, French, Ukrainian) 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, Russian, Brazilian Portuguese, German, French, Ukrainian)
• a PDF document (Spanish, Russian, Brazilian Portuguese, German, French, Ukrainian) or
• in EPUB format (for eBook readers) (Spanish, Russian, Brazilian Portuguese, German, French, Ukrainian).

Resources elsewhere on the web

• How to request software to be packaged if your app does not qualify to be submitted through MyApps (e.g. it's an Open Source application that is too big, a library or a system app), you don't know how to package and would like Ubuntu Developers to help you packaging it and including it in the Ubuntu archive, this guide is for you.
• The Personal Package Archive (PPA) Guide if you think your application is not yet ready for prime-time, but you'd still like to easily distribute it to users for testing, or if you want to have an alternative place to test the latest and potentially not stable versions of your software, you should consider creating a PPA in Launchpad. It's a really easy process, but you will need some packaging experience to create a package in the first place.
• The Debian New Maintainers’ Guide goes in depth into many of the topics addressed in the packaging guide. Debian is ‘the rock upon which Ubuntu is built’, and this guide discusses much of the architecture and infrastructure that we have inherited.