Automated packaging work

[Jonathan Lange]

Hello everyone,

We're doing some work to automatically package the things that
application developers submit to <http://developer.ubuntu.com>, and we
thought you might be interested in following along.

In a nutshell, we're going to put a service behind MyApps that
harnesses pkgme[1] to automatically generate packaging for binary
applications. We hope to extend it to automatically package other
types of applications (e.g. ./configure; make; make install) some day
soon.

If you want to know more, you can read the spec[2], look at the system
diagram[3], read our implementation plan[4] or watch the demo of pkgme
doing a binary application[5].

At the moment, it's James Westby and I working on this as our day jobs
at Canonical. However, we're both pretty keen to do everything in the
open, and would gladly welcome contributions.

Oh, speaking of openness. We're trying to gather up all of the work
that Ubuntu is doing to make life for application developers easier
and stick it on one wiki page so that everyone can figure out what
everyone else is doing. That page is:

  https://wiki.ubuntu.com/AppDevelopers

So important I couldn't possibly relegate it to the footnotes. It also
has links to the various Launchpad projects that we're using for the
automated packaging service.

cheers,
jml

[1] http://pkgme.net
[2] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/AutomagicBinaryPackaging
[3] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/AutomagicBinaryPackaging?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=pkgme-servicediagram.svg
[4] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/AutomagicBinaryPackaging/ImplementationPlan
[5] http://code.mumak.net/2011/08/automagic-packaging-of-binary-apps-for.html