launchpadblog

Recently I spent a day with Julian Edwards, one of the developers working on Launchpad’s Personal Package Archives feature.

We wanted to come up with a plan for improving the help materials we have for PPAs, including:

• documentation on the Launchpad help wiki
• the PPA page on the Launchpad tour
• user-interface text and in-line help.

Right now, our PPA help guide is one long and somewhat unwieldy wiki page. Over the next couple of months, I’m going to break it down into smaller guides each based around one particular task, such as creating the source package and uploading the package, including how to deal with errors.

Up until now, we haven’t included any help on actually creating a Debian-style package ready for uploading to a PPA. One of the reasons for that was that there’s a wealth of packaging material and support already available in the Ubuntu community and more widely. However, one of the new guides I’m going to create will look at basic packaging, tailored specifically to the needs of PPAs.

If you use PPAs, I’d love your input on this work. Either mail me directly, leave a comment here or visit the bug report and blueprints I’ve created:

• packaging guide blueprint
• package upload guide blueprint
• package publication lifecycle reference blueprint
• downloading and installing from PPAs guide blueprint
• bug report tracking changes needed for the PPA tour page.

This entry was posted by Matthew Revell on Thursday, April 9th, 2009 at 12:58 pm and is filed under PPA. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.