We’re doing some work to automatically package the things that application developers submit to the Ubuntu App Developer site, 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 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, look at the system diagram, read our implementation plan or watch the demo of pkgme doing a binary application.
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
It’s so important I couldn’t possibly leave it as a mere hyperlink. It also has links to the various Launchpad projects that we’re using for the automated packaging service.
Originally posted on the Ubuntu App Developer Blog by Jonathan Lange on Thu Nov 10 2011