The Ubuntu Packaging Guide

This guide is often one of the first things that a new Ubuntu contributor will look at. Helping make it better can have a big impact.

It is split up into two sections:

• A list of articles based on tasks, things you want to get done.
• A set of knowledge-base articles that dig deeper into specific bits of our tools and workflows.

The actual articles can be found under the ubuntu-packaging-guide directory in rst files. The html template and css can be found under themes/ubuntu. If adding a new article, make sure to add it to the ubuntu-packaging-guide/index.rst file so that it appears in the table of contents.

Development is hosted on Launchpad:

Bugs:	https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-packaging-guide/
Bzr Branch:	lp:ubuntu-packaging-guide
Translations:	https://translations.launchpad.net/ubuntu-packaging-guide

This project is licensed under the CC-BY-SA-3.0, the full text of which can be found in COPYING. Further information can be found in debian/copyright.

Sphinx & reStructuredText

The guide is built using Sphinx. Articles should be written in reStructuredText. The following links might be helpful:

• http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/user/rst/quickstart.html
• http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/user/rst/quickref.html

Building

The power of Sphinx is that it can generate documentation in many formats. Running make all will generate the guide in html, dirhtml, singlehtml, pickle, json, htmlhelp, qthelp, devhelp, epub, latex, latexpdf, text, and man formats. They will be written to the _build directory.

Not all of these formats are important to us. You can build an individual format with, for example, make html. Run make help for a list of all targets.

Please at least test your fixes by building the html version.

Translating

We use Sphinx l10n module and Gettext for translating Ubuntu Packaging Guide. Translating takes place on Launchpad, and translated .po files are automatically imported to the bzr branch.

Some notes about translating the guide:

• Only inline links can be translated currently. Do not translate named links.
• Some formatting is part of reStructuredText and should not be changed, including emphasis (which uses asterisks or underscores), paragraph ending before a code block (::) and double backtick quotes (``).

To test your translation, use make BUILDER-LANGUAGE command (for example, make html-it will build HTML docs in Italian language).