Developer Documentation?

[Jordan Mantha]

On 8/10/06, Andreas Lloyd <lloydinho at gmail.com> wrote:
> While writing up the Contribute doc, I wanted to link to some good
> references on Ubuntu development procedures, yet none seem to exist at
> present. The best I could find was this
> [https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DeveloperResources], which is woefully outdated.

Parts of it are outdated, some are still relevant. It's just not
maintained too much. A basic problem is that the people who are the
best to maintain such a doc are the ones who have the least amount of
time to do it.

> By looking around, I can see that this has been discussed at no less
> than two summits
> [https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuDownUnder/BOFs/IntroDeveloperDocs and
> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DeveloperDocumentation]

IntroDeveloperDocs became the Packaging Guide

> and that it was decided to make a reference guide along the lines of the
> Debian Developers' Reference
> [http://www.debian.org/doc/developers-reference/]. The spec [
> https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+spec/developer-documentation] says
> that it has been deferred to Edgy, but I have heard no mention of it.
> Does anybody know more?

Ian Jackson started work on that spec in Dapper but has been too busy
with other things (maintaining Firefox for one) to work on it much. I
am sort of taking over working on it but I haven't gotten very far
either. Right now the biggest problem is that it is written as a big
patch to the Debian Developer's Reference (DDR) which is written in
debiandoc SGML. I need to merge the existing changes with the latest
version of the DDR  and figure out how to use all the debian doc
tools.

> It would be really helpful for would-be developers to have such a
> reference (I guess the packaging guide at least covers part of the
> issues but it does not cover all of the relevant procedures).

Yes, it would. I spend a lot of time in #ubuntu-motu explaining how
Ubuntu does things and what the procedures for various things are.

-Jordan Mantha